If you’ve hired some web developer that’s stuck in the late nineties when it comes to design, well, you’re doing your business a great disservice.

• Would you hire a five year old to create a billboard design for your company?

• Would you hire a lawncare company to put in an inground pool?

• Would you hire a geologist to put in a new rock patio?

Of course not.

Defunct HTML

Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the programming language that renders websites to your computer screen.  While there are many other languages that can produce this code, the end result is always HTML.

Back in the day (early 90s), there were some really cool behind-the-scenes portions of code that you could add to your site that would help it rank well.  One was called the meta tag. The search engines weren’t really smart back then, so webmasters would hide little words in this tag.  The point was to trick the spiders into thinking your website was about something that it really wasn’t about at all.

Why trick the search engines?  Well, if you put in a popular phrase (say, Paris Hilton), the search engines would assume your website was about her, and you’d move up in the rankings.  The further up you got, the more traffic you received.

And receiving traffic off a big keyphrase was just fine with them.  Once you got to their website (and found out it wasn’t about Paris Hilton at all), you were still more likely to click on an ad than you were to hit the BACK button.  You clicking on that ad meant the web guy got paid.  He provided no value, yet got paid for you visiting his site.

Your Web Guy Might Be Hurting You

Fast forward about 7 years and the search engines have become a lot smarter.  So smart, in fact, that they stopped looking at that meta tag altogether.  They ignore it.  Totally ignore it.

Which makes me wonder – why did your web guy (or girl, I know) ask you for a list of your top twenty keywords?

I’ll tell you why – because they don’t understand today’s search environment.

Just like in NASCAR, once you get lapped by the leader a few times, you might as well give up.  Webmasters like this are still working on 1998 code.  They aren’t keeping up with the times, they’re just doing what they think will help their customers.  But it won’t help.  In fact, it’ll hurt them.

Extra Code Means Slower Load

Since this meta tag is being ignored by the search engines, there’s really no reason for it to even be in your HTML.  But since it’s there, this means that every visitor to your website has to load that extra line of code before they can see your page.  The more they have to download, the longer it takes, and search engines don’t like that.

Since the search engines want to provide the best possible experience to their end users, they are taking into consideration the time that a website takes to load.  If it takes a while, they’ll penalize you.  And each little penalty adds up to pushing you further and further down the overall rankings.  Even though (at this time) page load is a minor penalty, why would you want anything on your site that’s going to hurt your rankings?

Check for the Code

Wondering if your web guy put this code in your website?  It’s easy to check.

1. Load up your page.
2. Right-Click somewhere in the page where there is no picture, just a ‘blank’ area
3. Select View Source
4. Push CTRL and the F key (Find)
5. Look for ‘keyword’
6. If it’s there, you’ll see a string something like:
   <meta name=”keywords” content=”widgets, blue, orange… blah blah”>

If you’ve got that tag, you may want to ask your web designer next time you talk to him/her why it’s there.

Don’t Confuse Keywords with Descriptions

There is another meta tag, the description tag, which is very important in your overall rankings.  Don’t get this confused with the keyword tag.  Read more on the description tag.

Defending Webmasters

Now I know this post comes across as a bit rough, but I think it’s important for small business owners to realize that hiring one person to do a job doesn’t mean they should do all.  There are some terrific web designers out there.  In fact, I’m not a web designer.  While I help optimize websites, I prefer to leave the design portion to those who know it best.

If you’ve got a good web guy, by all means hold onto him.  Just realize that you should be asking him questions.  If he gets stale, your website gets stale, and you’ve wasted a lot of money building it.

And when you’re ready to hire an Internet marketing guru, consider me.

The snippets are generated from your meta description tag, one of the most important tags on your website when it comes to SEO.  If you haven’t got around to creating those meta description tags yet, or if every page on your website has the same stinkin’ tag, nows the time to get that fixed.

By the way, Derek Chew actually found the snippets several weeks ago.  So the announcement from Google is really more of a confirmation.

If you’ve been hired to do some SEO for one of these clients, I’ve got a nice little script that you can use to help you identify the pages without descriptions.

Part One: Getting all the pages to display a description tag

If you’re lucky, the designer built the site in a way that the header is it’s own file, usually called something like header.inc or header.php. This file houses the top HTML tags, the title tag, any javascript, CSS links, and of course the meta tags. Having one header file is great if you’ve got a top nav menu that you want to be the same across an entire site, or if you just want easier ways to identify your files.

The problem with one header file is that you can’t really hard-code the meta description tag, because then it’ll be the same across the entire site. In reality, every page on your site needs its own unique description. So how can you do this with one header file? Easy. Turn the tag into a variable.

<meta name=”description” value=”We offer the best widgets in the entire St. Louis area…”>

becomes

<?php $pagedesc=”We offer the best widgets in the entire St. Louis area…”; ?>
<meta name=”description” value=”<?php echo $pagedesc; ?>“>

Now that we’ve changed the description to a variable, we can play around with it a bit. First, we need to open a page (lets call it services.php – our services page) and add it’s custom header.

(top of services.php)

<?php $pagedesc=”We offer widget repair services in our fully equipped widget shop…”;
include ‘header.php’; ?>

By putting the pagedesc before the include, it will already have it set for that particular page. Now all we have to do is make one more change to the header file and we’re set with the description tag for every page.

<?php if (!$pagedesc) { $pagedesc=”We offer the best widgets in the entire St. Louis area…”; } ?>
<meta name=”description” value=”<?php echo $pagedesc; ?>”>

Now if a page doesn’t have a description, we can give it one. Albeit generic, at least we’re moving in the right direction, and the search engines will be happier and display a little better description of our site.

Part Two: Setting an alert for your pages that don’t have a description

This can be a pain, particularly if you’re taking over someone elses work, and you are perhaps a bit cloudy on the entire site layout.

What we’re going to do is simply add a few more lines to the header that will email us every time someone visits a page that doesn’t have a description. The email will have the link to the page, and we can then go in and start to fix these pages as they are visited.

(header.php)

<?php if (!$pagedesc) {
$page=”http://www.domain.com”.$_SERVER['PHP_SELF'];
$message=”The following page is missing a description:
Page: $page\n”;
mail(“will@willhanke.com”, “Page missing Meta Description”, $message);
$pagedesc=”We offer the best widgets in the entire St. Louis area…”;
} ?>
<meta name=”description” value=”<?php echo $pagedesc; ?>”>

Now I know there are programs out there that can do some fancy searches and spit out a list of all pages in violation of the page description tag, but since it’s not a deal breaker for web ranking, I like this method. It emails you, and when you have time you can get in there and update the pages that are (at least) being visited.