Does your site have meta tags and are they unique?

While this may sound like a no-brainer in fact you'd be surprised how many sites either don't have meta tags in place, or don't have unique tags in place.

In some cases the site owners think it's too difficult, especially with dynamic sites, but I'm here to tell you that even with dynamic sites you can have unique enough meta tags that each page could rank on its own. In fact I recently wrote an article on optimizing dynamic sites.

But even if you have a static site, no matter what size, each page should have at least 3 unique tags - the title tag, the meta description and the meta keywords tag. Here's why:

Most search engines use the title tag (the tag located between the tags) as the clickable link in the search results. Therefore you want the title to be as compelling as possible to encourage the click from the visitor browsing the listings.

As a side note, I'd recommend looking at what the competition is doing in the search results so you can try to make your title stand out more. For example, if the top sites all have the keyword as the first word in the title, consider making your phrase appear later in the title so it stands out. Look at the following example:

keyword goes here
keyword goes here
here goes the keyword
keyword goes here

Do you see how the keyword stands out in the third example? There is a better chance of catching the searchers attention with this listing because it stands out from the rest.

Similarly, some search engines will use the meta description when displaying search results. Therefore why not optimize it? Again, use keywords within the description, but make it compelling enough to also capture the searchers attention and click on the result.

The title and description can work together to help encourage the searcher to pick your site over the others, regardless of the position achieved, if it is compelling enough and provides them with enough information to want to explore your site more.

If this is the case you MUST be sure that the page also contains relevant information, or you've wasted your optimization efforts and likely frustrated the site visitor who will promptly hit the 'back' button because they didn't find what they wanted.

I'm sure you are also saying 'but Google doesn't use the keywords tag.' While this must be true remember there are other engines out there that do use this tag when ranking the pages. Yahoo! for example does consider the keywords tag in ranking, and evidence seems to indicate that MSN does as well.

Not to mention the hundreds of 2nd and 3rd tier engines which do use the keywords meta tag in ranking.

I guess this brings me to another point - don't focus your efforts just on Google (as is commonly the case). Sure Google will drive the most traffic for you, but in many cases that's about 50-60% of the total. By not considering other engines you could be alienating 40-50% (or more) of your target audience.

Does your site use a sitemap?

A sitemap is one of the basic components that every site should have, regardless of size. Even if you have a site with millions of pages there are ways to effectively map it with multiple site maps.

Site maps provide a centralized location for a search engine crawler to start indexing your site. If they get trapped on a page with no outgoing links, they can always refer back to the sitemap to continue their crawl.

Therefore every single page should be linked to from a sitemap, and every page should have at least a link back to the sitemap and home page.

If, for some reason, a sitemap is out of the question there are other options. Google offers an XML based sitemap creation tool which helps you build a list of URLs you can submit to Google. Yahoo! also offers a sitemap submission tool. By creating a static text file with a list of all your URLs which you can then submit to Yahoo! you can be assured that it will find all the pages.

Keep in mind though that even using such tools doesn't guarantee rankings, only that you've made the engines aware of the pages.

I should tell you that recently I had the opportunity to talk to some Google staffers who said that if your site is fully crawlable and already indexed, then you probably don't need to worry about generating a Google sitemap. The sitemap is just a way to help the crawler find the content it may not be finding. But if this is the case, my suggestion is to find ways to help the crawler find that content on its own through improved navigation.

Consider using breadcrumb navigation

Breadcrumb navigation is becoming more popular with a lot of sites, not only because it helps crawlers, but is also an effective aid in user navigation.

If you don't know, breadcrumb navigation shows the path you've taken, or provides a path to the next highest page on the site. An example would be:

Home > Product Category > Product Page

Where the 'Home' and 'Product Category' text would actually be hyperlinks to the corresponding higher level pages.

By linking this way, a search engine crawler can find every page within a few clicks of almost every other page on the site (depending on how deep your site is). As you can see in the above sample, every product page is within a couple clicks of every other product page.

Both the users and crawlers could click on either the 'home' or 'product category' links and navigate more of the site from there.

Use static page names

While there is still debate in the industry on whether renaming dynamic pages to static pages is required, I can tell you from experience that in most cases a static page will outperform a dynamic page in rankings. Search engines just seem to prefer static pages.

Therefore, if you can, either create static pages, or implement a URL rewriter software package to create those static URL's for you.

Again, as part of my talk with Google staff, they suggested a 'couple' variables in your URL 'should' be ok. Of course they didn't give specifics, and I have seen URLs with a couple variables get indexed, but again they were generally outranked by a similar static page.

If you do use a rewriter, be sure to organize the site logically. While you could have the rewriter rewrite URLs so they all appear in the root of the site, it's probably best to organize them into subfolders based on product groupings or some other common element.

This will also help reinforce to the search engines which pages should be grouped together and are related.

In my experience, both URLs which recreate all the pages in the root and rewriters which restructure the site into logical subfolders do well in the search engines. So really the decision is up to you, but for ease of use and management, I'd suggest subfolders.

If you do use the subfolder method, don't go more than 2 or 3 deep.

What else is there?

Of course there are other quick tips like minimizing flash and externalizing script, but that's about it.

The pointers I've given here I've seen on hundreds of sites over the years and on every one that has made the above changes there has been noticeable improvements in search engine rankings.

For example, on one site that implemented a URL rewriter, the total indexed page count went from 14,000 pages to over 4 million and total search engine referrals almost tripled!

So if you are wondering just why your site isn't ranking in the search engines, take a look at the things I've suggested above. Chances are just by implementing some of the changes (like meta tags and breadcrumb navigation for example) you will see an improvement within weeks.


Rob Sullivan
Head Organic Search Strategist
Enquiro Full Service Search Engine Marketing

Copyright 2003 - 2005 - Searchengineposition Inc.