When I do a Google Search on “Lampion” (the name of my company is “Lampion Consulting”) Google shows the following:
Lampion Consulting - the cost of waiting
item1a, DSC_7519, item1a. wrapbg1. to work on your messaging… …the wait’s killing you. better time. If you’ve been waiting. for a
How do i set up the page description so I can get a better subhead on the search (e.g. Lampion Consulting – communications strategies and counsel at defining moments…"
Understand. I thought, even without HTML text, that search engines would at least take the description o the page. I see many sites that have a nice “tagline” or subhead ater their name that is not the same as the HTML text on their home page.
Just remember, only one H1 tag per page, and it should have a strong
concordance with the Title of the page (and the semantic meaning of
the content, too).
Walter
On Aug 5, 2009, at 8:09 PM, DeltaDave wrote:
H1 & H2 tags are classed as pretty important in the SEO world.
Can someone help me understand what an H1 and H2 tag is?
Also, I looked under “actions” and did not see it listed.
Can you give me an example exactly how I would use it to correct the issue I raised above? Again, I see most sites end up with a good page description in the search engine listing. How did they do that? When I look at their page, the description is not part o their HTML text, so thet must be doing something right with page descriptions.
My page descriptions have the exact wording I would hope to have show up in a listing. Meta tags repeat the same words and have other key words.
On 6 Aug 2009, 2:11 am, waltd wrote:
Just remember, only one H1 tag per page, and it should have a strong
concordance with the Title of the page (and the semantic meaning of
the content, too).
Walter
On Aug 5, 2009, at 8:09 PM, DeltaDave wrote:
H1 & H2 tags are classed as pretty important in the SEO world.
Can someone help me understand what an H1 and H2 tag is?
The ‘H’ stands for ‘Heading’. Think of it like a word-processing
document: You have a big, important heading at the top, which has to
do with the content of the document. Then, for each section you have a
sub-heading, which is also to do with the content, but which is not as
big, bold and important as the main heading. If you’re reading this
hypothetical word-processing document, you can skim-read the headings
and subheads to get a quick idea of what the document is all about,
without having to sit down and read it all.
That’s what happens when Google indexes your site — it takes note of
the headings and sub headings, and if they seem to agree with the
content, it’ll reward you with a better ranking. It’s all part of the
structure of the document, these days called the ‘Semantic Web’. Your
document is split into different pieces: a title, a description,
keywords, a sub-title, then various subheadings, which are themselves
divided into paragraphs. It all flows nicely, and makes sense to a
dumb robot, or equally, someone using a screen-reader.
The headings go in diminishing order of importance, from h1 to h6.
I believe the description you mention is the “Title” tag. That is what
the search engines use for your “Description”.
DW
On Aug 6, 2009, at 1:38 AM, SkipII wrote:
Can someone help me understand what an H1 and H2 tag is?
Also, I looked under “actions” and did not see it listed.
Can you give me an example exactly how I would use it to correct
the issue I raised above? Again, I see most sites end up with a
good page description in the search engine listing. How did they do
that? When I look at their page, the description is not part o their
HTML text, so thet must be doing something right with page
descriptions.
My page descriptions have the exact wording I would hope to have
show up in a listing. Meta tags repeat the same words and have other
key words.
On 6 Aug 2009, 2:11 am, waltd wrote:
Just remember, only one H1 tag per page, and it should have a strong
concordance with the Title of the page (and the semantic meaning of
the content, too).
Walter
On Aug 5, 2009, at 8:09 PM, DeltaDave wrote:
H1 & H2 tags are classed as pretty important in the SEO world.
How does this concept of H1 and H2 play out in the structure of Freeway? In other words, is Page Title the equivalent of H1 and Page Description is the equivalent of H2?
Where is this “Image Replacement” action found? I don;t see it on any of the action menus.
If I have put a good page title and page description in my tags, why then do those words not show up in Google search as the “description” of my site? Again, I have seen plenty of sites that have good descriptions on the search listing and those words are not necessarily words on their home page.
The ‘H’ stands for ‘Heading’. Think of it like a word-processing
document: You have a big, important heading at the top, which has to
do with the content of the document. Then, for each section you have a
sub-heading, which is also to do with the content, but which is not as
big, bold and important as the main heading. If you’re reading this
hypothetical word-processing document, you can skim-read the headings
and subheads to get a quick idea of what the document is all about,
without having to sit down and read it all.
That’s what happens when Google indexes your site it takes note of
the headings and sub headings, and if they seem to agree with the
content, it’ll reward you with a better ranking. It’s all part of the
structure of the document, these days called the ‘Semantic Web’. Your
document is split into different pieces: a title, a description,
keywords, a sub-title, then various subheadings, which are themselves
divided into paragraphs. It all flows nicely, and makes sense to a
dumb robot, or equally, someone using a screen-reader.
The headings go in diminishing order of importance, from h1 to h6.
How does this concept of H1 and H2 play out in the structure of
Freeway? In other words, is Page Title the equivalent of H1 and Page
Description is the equivalent of H2?
No, not really. The title is what appears at the very top of the
browser window. It certainly has a ranking on Google, but I’m not sure
exactly where it falls, likewise the Description.
Where is this “Image Replacement” action found? I don;t see it on
any of the action menus.
I’d like to know this one too, for a current project.
If I have put a good page title and page description in my tags,
why then do those words not show up in Google search as the
“description” of my site? Again, I have seen plenty of sites that
have good descriptions on the search listing and those words are not
necessarily words on their home page.
I don’t know. If you’ve entered a Description meta tag, it should show
up that way in Google. Have you maybe only entered it recently, and
it’s taking a while to show on Google, as sometimes happens? Are you
sure it’s actually there, in the code?
If you look at your page title, keywords, and description, non of what
is said in them is mentioned on that page.
Google is probably picking up on this discrepancy between your page
title, keywords and description to the actual page content, and
thought, if I return the page description content, the listing would
not be truthful to a potential user. So essentially you are trying to
trick Google, and it knows.
Your index.html is only a gateway page with no actual content to speak
of. If you added HTML content more akin to your title, keywords, and
description this would help all round.
Even saying all this, Google is noticeably returning page content on
rather than what is used in the page description tag. I would say
that title and description are so often wrong, or abused it is more
likely to be ignored these days.
I would also question having a gateway page. If it is correct that you
loose 50% of traffic on every click, is a gateway page any good to you
ultimately?
David
On 5 Aug 2009, at 20:21, SkipII wrote:
When I do a Google Search on “Lampion” (the name of my company is
“Lampion Consulting”) Google shows the following:
Lampion Consulting - the cost of waiting
item1a, DSC_7519, item1a. wrapbg1. to work on your
messaging… …the wait’s killing you. better time. If you’ve been
waiting. for a
How do i set up the page description so I can get a better subhead
on the search (e.g. Lampion Consulting – communications strategies
and counsel at defining moments…"
With no real human-readable text on your page why would Google trust your meta tag content? You need to use regular HTML text on the page that matches up with the meta description at least moderately well, then you stand a chance of getting your description used in search results.
However, this won’t really help that much. Your page description meta tag contains the following text: “Lampion Consulting, Lampion, Communications and messaging consulting, Paul Heagen”. I wouldn’t call this terribly descriptive - if I saw that as the result of a Google search I’d be no more informed than I am with the current results.
My opinion: don’t use this page as a teaser, get some actual info into that layout and do it with HTML text. It doesn’t matter how perfectly-crafted you make your graphic type if people can’t find it and don’t understand it when they do.
I’ve just tried the image replacement action which is simple to use but it somehow changed the formatting on the actual page throwing various elements out of place.
Thanks all. Message is that SEO strategy outweighs design.
Whatever you do don’t go away thinking that! If you have a well-
designed site, with reasonable SEO set up, but most importantly,
with great content (this is easy to say, but very hard to do) and
possibly some way of telling people about it other than search
engines, it’ll trump the search engines every time. Just a simple link
in your email signature can work greater wonders than SEO ever will,
particularly if you belong to a few groups of forums like this one.
Design trumps everything. It’s what makes your newspaper easy to read,
what makes your bottle-opener work so well, and it’s why you’re using
a Mac. If we depended on SEO, we’d all be using Windows. Seriously,
design contains everything, it’s not just the look and feel, it’s how
it works, it contains its own marketing. If you have the time and/or
the inclination, I’d recommend reading Seth Godin’s blog: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/
Unless you’re a marketing man, that is … you’ll hate it
You’ll be pleased to hear that it isn’t true that SEO strategy outweighs design. Good design takes all things into account when the problem is evaluated and comes up with a solution that incorporates all relevant issues in some way.
SEO and the related issue of accessibility are simply factors (important factors, granted) to be taken into consideration, not things to be tacked on afterwards or used instead of good design.
I don’t know. If you’ve entered a Description meta tag, it should
show up that way in Google. Have you maybe only entered it recently,
and it’s taking a while to show on Google, as sometimes happens? Are
you sure it’s actually there, in the code?
Google re-indexes sites based in large measure on their popularity. If
it hasn’t shown up in 4 - 6 weeks, I would worry. But not until then.
You’ll be pleased to hear that it isn’t true that SEO strategy
outweighs design.
I think some confusion arises here, in that while good design will
outweigh many of the SEO worries, really good design is inhibited by
what the browsers can translate from the various species of HTML. At
the moment this limits fonts to what’s on the receiving PC or Mac -
hence the temptation to use graphic text everywhere you want unique
styling. However, using CSS with careful choice of styles can still be
very effective and, as has been noted in other threads, the font
limitation may disappear in the not too distant future.
The ‘box model’, too, has a limiting effect on design capability
unless, unlike me, you are very clever and preferably into code.
The one thing that outweighs it all - SEO, design, meta tags, the lot
is content. So may web sites seem to be designed first, with content
added later, rather than meticulously planning the structure of the
content and the navigation through it as the priority (and I’ve been
guilty before now!). That’s often not as easy to do as saying it, as
clients are apt to add and subtract information as the design proceeds
and, often as not, they only give you 50% of what needs to go in at
the briefing! Nevertheless, my experience is that if you get the
content and navigation structure right, so that site visitors can find
what they want in a couple of clicks, the web site ends up in the top
echelons of Google, et al, for all relevant and realistic search
terms, anyway.
In short, if the content doesn’t hold you, you’ll never go back again,
anyway, no matter how “pretty” the site. Neither will the search
engines give the site much credence.
