Meta Tags and Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimizationis a big topic that fills books and I will only discuss it briefly.

Wikipedia describes it as follows:

"Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site or a web page (such as a blog) from search engines via "natural" or un-paid ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results [...]."

In easier words: how can you, as a designer and administrator, improve your site so that it will show up very high on Google's (or Yahoo's, etc) search results page? Since your fanpage is not a business this isn't super important, but it could bring you a few more visitors with just a little bit of effort.

How does this work?

Search engines use programs called spiders or crawlers to go through websites and record all the content and follow all internal and external links. Important to note is that these spiders can only read text. Everything that is put into graphics is hidden.

This is the one side of SEO that you can influence yourself - the content of your page. The other side is everything that's going on outside of your page, meaning all the backlinks you get from other websites.

Do's & Don'ts

+ Changing the <title> tag

Every one of your pages should have a different title according to the content of that page, for example you should have a structure similar to this: "Biography | Your Fanpage's Name", "A Movie Title | Filmography | Your Fanpage's Name". The title of the current site should be first. You could use a Wordpress plugin for SEO to automatically handle this for you (take a look at Wordpress Plugins You Should Install).

+ Using the <alt> attribute for images

You're probably not paying much attention to this, but maybe you should. As mentioned before, spiders cannot see what's on a photo, but when you add a title or description through the <alt> attribute, the spiders knows what's on the picture and can return it as a search result.

+ Permalinks or The Friendly URL

Another thing that Wordpress can handle for you very easily, you just have to change the settings. By default Wordpress URLs look like this: domain.com/p?=123. Now from this URL neither you, a visitor or a spider can tell what's actually on that page. Change the permalink settings and the URL will look like this: domain.com/biography. So much better!

+ Have a Sitemap

Another great way to make sure a spider will find every single part of your fanpage. Take a look at Wordpress Plugins You Should Install for a plugin that will do the job for you.

+ Update your Content

Content is king and the more content you have on your fanpage the more often it will show up in the search results. Even better are regular updates, so don't underestimate the news articles on your homepage. They can give your site a push in the search engines.

- Splash Page

These are very popular among fanpages, especially when there are several languages to choose from. It's even worse when there's only a flash animation with the link embedded. That's practically a dead end for every search engine.
Instead, open with the real homepage, you know, the one that has all the content. If your page offers more than one language, you could use a very simple script to identify your visitor's preferred browser language and redirect him to the correct page (» Read more) or you can use a Wordpress plugin that can handle several languages for you and adds links or a drop-down so your visitors can choose a language (for example WPML Multilingual CMS).

- Flash Menus

Much like flash animations on a splash page, menus created entirely in flash cannot be read by spiders. They can't follow the link and go deeper into your page. If you insist on flash menus, it's a good idea to add the same links as simple text links in your footer. As I mentioned before this is a vast topic and I am only giving you a few keywords here. If you would like to read a little bit more (without getting into the matter too deep), these are great articles about "SEO for Designers" you should check out:

» SEO Guide for Designers (Web Designer Wall)
» 10 SEO Rules for Designers (Just Creative Design)
» SEO for Designers (twentysix Search)

So what about those Meta Tags?

In the meta tags you can add information about your website, like title, description and keywords. Back in the old days meta tags were used by the search engines to find out what a website is about and list them accordingly. But then people started to abuse the meta tags, adding tons of keywords that had no relation to their website's content, which in the end made search results very unreliable and people were tricked into visiting websites they were not interested in.

Search engines changed a lot and do not use the meta tags anymore to identify the content. However it can't hurt to add them anyway, especially for a nice, one sentence description of your website.

Add this code into the <head> tag at the top of your pages:
<meta name="description" content="put your page description here" />

And here's why: search engines still use this description when they list your site as a search result. If such a description isn't found, it happens that the first few words from your site are used as a description instead, which might not be what you intended. (picture from Google Webmaster Central).

In addition, some directory scripts can use this description as well. For example if you want to add a link at Link-Lounge.com, you will notice the button that says "Get META Description". To test this, only enter your website URL and then hit that button. If you have correct meta tags the title and description of your website will be filled in automatically.

Even if you don't want to use this, you should still take a quick look at your tags - especially when using Wordpress. Sometimes a default description is entered when installing a script, and you don't want your website's description show up as "just another Wordpress blog", do you?

Take a look at these articles for more examples:

» Google's official instructions about Meta Tags
» How to use Meta Tags