Are You Getting The Most From Your Meta Tags?

Are You Getting The Most From Your Meta Tags?

by: Francisco Aloy

As any Web Business startup knows, creating a Website is a bunch of work! You have to bother with content, layout, graphics and HTML links, just to name a few. What about your Meta Tags?

Meta Tags are words that are placed in your web page to provide a title, description and keywords to the Search Engine spiders or crawlers. They are not visible to visitors. To see a sample, open any website and click กViewก on the menubar, and choose กSource.ก Youกll see the Meta Tags up top, within the Head section of the web page.

Most Search Engines will rank your site on how well your Meta Tags provide a description of the content of your web pages. Google is the exception; it also takeกs into account the number and quality of backward links to your website. Here lately, thereกs been differing opinions on the relevancy of Googleกs Page Rank system. Some experts don’t consider it accurate or necessary.

Yet and still, there are many other Search Engines and a further study of Meta Tags is in order. We are going to base our Meta Tags revision on a tool known as a word Frequency Counter. It counts and separates the words in a web page or document, giving you an idea of what words are used most.

Here are some Web based Frequency Counters:

http://www.mytranslate.com/wordfrequency.htm

http://rainbow.arch.scriptmania.com/tools/word_counter.html

http://www.writewords.org.uk/word_count.asp

http://www.writewords.org.uk/phrase_count.asp

http://web4future.com/free/wordcount.htm

http://www.keywordcount.com/

Each one of the Frequency Counters above has different uses and qualifications. The Writewords counter has two flavors: word and phrase count. The Web4Future counter is Web based or a standalone download.

How to use them:

Copy and paste the content of the web page in question and see what the top word frequencies are. You can eliminate most articles and modifiers and concentrate on pure words. As an example: If your web page is about red and blue widgets, the words ‘red/blue/widgetsก should have the highest frequency.

A Word of Caution About Writing Content:

Use the Frequency Counters AFTER you write the web page content. Don’t allow word frequency to get in the way of your natural writing style. Do NOT attempt to hit a certain frequency percentage; youกll be penalized by many Search Engines for too much keyword usage.

In Closing

Though the word Frequency Counters are good tools for a quick check, nothing compares to laserfocused writing for good Meta Tags information. Let your writing flow naturally and stay concentrated on your subject keywords. If you do that, youกll find it easy to weave your keywords into your content and Meta Tags.

by Francisco Aloy

(C)2004 Francisco Aloy

About The Author

Francisco Aloy is the creator of The Newbie Business Guide.

Constructive and clear information for your new Internet Business.

To see more of Mr. Aloyกs articles, visit: http://www.newbiebusinessguide.com

This article was posted on January 12

by Francisco Aloy

Reach vs. Frequency: Is it better to reach 25 Peo

Reach vs. Frequency: Is it better to reach 25 People Four Times or 100 People Once

by: Julie Chance

Reach and frequency are terms generally used when planning advertising campaigns. However, the concept of reach and frequency applies to any promotional activity you undertake: direct mail, direct selling, and even networking.

Reach is the number of people you touch with your marketing message or the number of people that are exposed to your message. Frequency is the number of times you touch each person with your message. In a world of unlimited resources you would obviously maximize both reach and frequency. However, since most of us live in the world of limited resources we must often make decisions to sacrifice reach for frequency or vice versa.

For example, an air conditioning repair service who has decided to do a direct mail piece has to decide whether to mail the entire Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex once or to mail a quarter of the Metroplex four times. An attorney who receives many of her clients through networking may have to decide whether to attend one weekly networking meeting or four different monthly meetings.

When faced with decisions of reach vs. frequency remember this rule of thumb:

Reach without Frequency = Wasted Money

Marketing is the process of building a business relationship with potential customers. Have you ever established a lifelong friendship with someone you had contact with only once? Probably not. Generally friendships (and all relationships for that matter) grow as a result of frequent contact over time. Even when the potential to form a great friendship is there at the first encounter, it is unlikely it will grow without nurturing.

Seth Godin in his book Permission Marketing uses an analogy of seeds and water to demonstrate the importance of assuring adequate frequency in your promotional campaigns. If you were given 100 seeds with enough water to water each seed once would you plant all 100 seeds and water each one once or would you be more successful if you planted 25 seeds and used all of the water on those 25 seeds?

While intuitively and even conceptually we understand the importance of frequency to successful promotional and sales campaigns, somehow when it comes to actually implementing the campaign, we opt to sacrifice frequency for reach. And then we complain about the ineffectiveness of our promotional efforts. Undoubtedly one of the biggest wastes of marketing dollars is promotional activities that are implemented without adequate frequency.

When faced with the decision of mailing one direct mail piece to 10,000 people or mailing to 2,500 people four times think about the fate of those 100 seeds you can water only once. Unless you have water rights and can obtain additional water, opt for less reach and more frequency.

About The Author

Julie Chance is president of StrategiesbyDESIGN, a Dallas based firm that helps small businesses and service professionals Map A Path to Success by providing consulting, training and skills based coaching in the area of marketing strategy development. For more information or to sign up for our free marketing tips enewsletter go to www.strategiesbydesign.com or call 9727019311

© 2003 StrategiesbyDESIGN. May be reprinted with credits and contact information.

[email protected]

This article was posted on August 25, 2003

by Julie Chance