The devil's advocate

As a copywriter and online editor, I’ve always considered it my duty to ensure that the text I publish online is absolutely correct. I double check for grammar errors and misspellings, and I’d be mortified if one slipped through. After all, I am representing my brand, and a professional image can be badly dented by sloppy writing.

Imagine my shock, then, when an SEO professional suggested to me that I might want to introduce a few common errors into my web copy. Admittedly, he was playing devil’s advocate, but there was logic behind his stance, which was as follows:

People use their most lax English when they’re online, unobserved. Almost always, folk are in a rush to get off the search engine and onto their destination, so typos are commonplace. Add into the mix the fact that the greater population may not aspire to the high standards of spelling and grammar that we editors may impose upon ourselves. Indeed, spend any time with the log files of your website, and you’ll see many highly, erm, creative spellings of your key words.

Consider, if you will, the famous film It’s A Wonderful Life. A quick glance at Amazon’s auto-suggest search box reveals that it’s as likely to be searched for with that crucial apostrophe in ‘It’s’ as it is without, no matter how much that might make us grammar-pedants cringe. So the question is, should you optimise both for those who would never dream of missing out an apostrophe, and those who drop it like a hot potato?

Personally, I do not have any problem with putting both variants into my metadata, where it need never be seen by anyone other than a search engine’s crawl-bot. The thought of deliberately including such an error on my web page’s copy, though, is quite a different matter. And yet, to optimise properly for those who miss it out, that is the suggestion.

It’s A Wonderful Life is just one example, and perhaps not a terribly important one. The issue becomes more complex when you consider foreign languages with their accents and umlauts and so forth: hasty typists will leave them off, but does that mean that they would be comfortable to see webpage copy reflecting their own lazy typing habits?

To take this concept to its extreme, would you deliberately introduce misspellings of your own brand name on your site? I’m guessing that the answer is certainly not. Ultimately, I suspect that introducing misspellings is the strategy of someone who prizes SEO above all else – because it is his job to do so – while it’s equally a strategy that a careful editor would never accept. Where would you stand?

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No such thing as a free lunch? Or is it simply a case of if it is free, it can’t be of much use? In this case neither is correct.

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RIP Meta Tags
2005
A fond farewell
to a dear friend
(of Black Hat SEO)[I had better quickly say that Title Tags are incredibly important to search engines and therefore absolutely vital to SEO. But technically Title Tags are not Meta Tags so I will continue....]

In SEO terms, Meta Tags have been dead for sometime. Google hasn’t taken in to account Meta tags, when rating a web page’s importance, since 2005.

So is there any point in even bothering with them then?

Yes, definitely. Meta Tags can provide relevant information regarding a web page and it is simply good practise and housekeeping to ensure your Meta tags are correct.

One key Meta Tag that should not be ignored is the Meta Description Tag.

Although Google doesn’t rate your Meta description text when compiling the importance of a web page, they will take the first 25 words (approx.) of the description and display them in your listing on a search results page. If you haven’t bothered filling in the description, Google will then go to DMOZ, and take your description from there. Not listed on DMOZ… ok then… Google will simply take a bit of random text from your website.

Therefore, your listing may then read something like….

Welcome to ABC Widgets Ltd
ABC Widgets · Home | About Us | Services | Contact | Help | Sitemap · << Back. ABC Widgets…
abcwidgets.co.uk/about.html – 17k -

Well, that certainly is enlightening to all potential visitors! I can’t really see anyone beating a path to ABC Widgets door anytime soon.

You can therefore see that the Meta description is an important way of getting information about your company across to people.

However, you should also be able to see how the Meta description could actually be put to work for you as a promotional tool – not with Google but with potential customers. Use words and phrases that a visitor will use to search for a business like yours and write text that will simply shout for people to click on your listing rather than someone else’s.

Your description could include any current promotions you may be running, discounts provided, specialised services you offer, etc. Why not put in your contact telephone number? And a call for action – ‘call us today for all your widget needs’? But remember to make it relevant and current, you don’t want to disappoint your visitors when they arrive at your website – your bounce rate my go up rather sharply!

Take note of other companies’ descriptions when you are searching the net for information, this will give you a good idea of how others are utilising this resource to promote their online business. Then go and search your own keywords and see what your competitors are up to! I suspect you may then want to take a bit more notice of your own Meta description…