Assignment #1 Follow Up

Welcome authors!

It was a pleasure to peruse all your sites and see how active many of you have been in creating great sites for readers to visit and learn more.

My job, of course, is to help you improve on what you already have and for that reason I'm going to address a simple technical detail that 3 out of the 4 sites I visited could benefit from. If you belong to the 1 out of 4 who doesn't need this tip, you get a pass on this particular assignment.

Today the lesson/assignment is on meta tags.

Meta-what?

Exactly. It's programmer speak, so who better to create a metaphor for it than Cedar Fort's own IT Manager, Bryce.

Consider your website a library. Each page should be a title of a book with a brief introduction with what the books should be about. Any search engine or customer online should be able to look at the header of their browser or in the google search results to see what your site is about.

As an example, I'm going to use Frank Cole. #1 because I know he has a good sense of humor and #2 because I know he didn't create his website and therefore won't take it personally.

Now if you google Frank's book, Hashbrown Winters, his site will show up on the first page of the google search because that is the exact address of his url. That is the ONLY reason it will show up because if you click the following link you will see how he has no meta tags and all it says over his site is the default "Welcome."

http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=1G1GGLQ_ENUS256&q=hashbrown+winters&aq=f&oq=&aqi=

Notice all the other search results list information about both Frank and his book through their meta tags and Frank's site kind of disappears in their midst. This also plays a huge role in that if I google ANYTHING but the title, Frank's site will not show up. If I google Frank Cole's name, these are the results:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1G1GGLQ_ENUS256&q=frank+cole&aq=f&oq=&aqi=

Frank isn't even on the map when I google his name, but I do find "Frank Cole Mysteries" as far as books go. If someone is looking you for you, it can be very frustrating to find the wrong Frank Cole and have to drill down page after page of google results to find the right one.

Contrast this with Preetham Grandi's search results when you google his book:

http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=1G1GGLQ_ENUS256&q=a+circle+of+souls&aq=f&oq=&aqi=

This is a word combination that has some competition (WoW and other businesses use it), but Preetham is the #1 hit and his meta tags tell you what you are clicking on in the results page.

Furthermore, when you start typing Preetham's name in, google fills the rest of his name in for you and these are the search results for Preetham Grandhi:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1G1GGLQ_ENUS256&q=preetham+grandhi&aq=f&oq=&aqi=

Again, he is #1.

Both Frank and Preetham's sites are great, but this illustrates how to use meta tags to let your sites serve their intended purpose.

So, I started this by saying that 3 out of 4 of you need to work on your meta tags. Some need to simply label their pages to be specific "titles" while others need to fill in keyword search terms. To do so you should simply need to go to the tools section of your site builder, locate the meta tag function and fill in the blanks they ask you to fill in.

Remember Bryce’s advice to name the page like a book and fill in the secondary tags like a small bio of the page. Default names for pages will be things like “Home” and “About Us.” Change “Home” to “(Your Name Here)’s Official Home Page.” Change “Contact Us” to “Email (Your Name)” or something specific to your site.

That simple.

First rule of your web site is that it should help people find you, not disappear into the crush. So your follow up assignment is to go through your meta tags, update them and then re-post your website to show that you have finished.

I promise our next assignment is more fun than this, but for now... Go! :)