shesafish

	Tuesday, October 15, 2002

 Getting noticed by Search Engines

This is an excellent CityDesk tip. I always forget to manually set meaningful page titles.

Search engine expert Danny Sullivan: “The value of adding meta keywords tags to pages seems little worth the time. In my opinion, the meta keywords tag is dead, dead, dead... I say good riddance!”

Carefully crafted titles are far more useful in getting good search engine placement. In CityDesk, if you have a variable named siteName, you can put it in the title of every page by putting

<title>{$.siteName$}</title>

in your template. You can add the headline too, for even more relevance:

<title>{$.headline$} - {$.siteName$}</title>

[CityDesk News]

While you're re-titling your pages, take advantage of Day 27's lesson from Dive Into Accessibility: Using real headers. The effect? "Google appreciates a well-structured page, and ranks keywords higher when they appear in real header tags. (Yet another reason to write well-crafted post titles.)"

Hey...wrapping post titles in <H4> tags will get you noticed by Google too. I hadn't thought of that. Time to tweak the item template...

Just noticed this: Dive Into Accessibility has an index which allows you to browse accessibility tips by person. The last person in the list is a "blind" user that we all know. The index lists eight accessibility tips that benefit this particular user. That user's name is Google.

11:56:28 PM  comment [] | Topics: CityDesk