Keywords and Title Tags in search engine ranking

There are a few things that a technical person such as myself can determine just looking at a web site through a normal internet browser like Internet Explorer or Firefox.

The first thing I do when I am consulting someone is load up the web site in question right click on the Web page somewhere in the background and then click on View Source. Viewing source on web sites and copying code is the equivalent of web designer college.

This shows the source code of the web site, the HTML that decides what the web site looks like and also what this web site is “about” with a title tag, meta keywords and meta description. This is how Google knows your insurance web site is about insurance and not about kittens or football.

To see if you are telling the Internet the correct things about your web site, load up Internet Explorer or any browser and click View then Source. You don’t have to read all of it, the meta data is in the first 5-10 lines of the source. If you don’t see anything then you probably need to talk to a new company to handle your Internet precense.

Here are some screenshots to show what I’m talking about. I always use cnn.com as a example of someone who is doing it right and another random web site that doesn’t have any meta data as a example of zero efforts.

It takes probably 10-15 seconds of time to add a title, keywords and a description to a web site and if yours doesn’t have them then e-mail your web designer immediately since you are basically invisible to search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo.

Failing:

Winning: