How to Write Meta Titles and Descriptions

Every week we get phone calls from our clients on what to write in the Meta title, Meta description and Meta keywords fields. So in case you have the same questions and to save you time we’ve put together this post to help you learn all you need to know about Meta Data, and how to effectively use it in your business for SEO and drive traffic to your website.

Meta keywords

Let’s deal with the easiest first. Meta keywords has zero (0) impact on search engine rankings for Google, as it has not been a ranking factor for years. Save yourself the time and skip this step. However, some people do use this field to enter keywords for internal search in Magento.

Meta Title

The Meta title is the most important piece of Meta data for SEO. In addition to giving a boost to your rankings, it will in most cases act as the headline in the search results page. However, Google will in some cases create its own Meta title based on content on your page if it believes it to be better suited to the search query.

When writing your Meta title, it is important to consider three things: the length of the sentence, the keywords you wish to optimise for on the specific page and how you can convince the searchers to click on your listing.

The length

Google only gives you a limited space for your Meta title, with the space dependent on width rather than characters. But for simplicity’s sake, we normally say that you have between 56-60 characters for your Meta title. Whatever exceeds this lengths will not be shown in the search results, and replaced with “…” as can be seen in the image above. Google will still consider the excluded information for search results, but we recommend keeping the information concise to ensure that the important information is visible to the searchers. Keeping the Meta title too short such as LED Torch Shop in the example above, you miss out on both ranking for added keywords, while having less of a chance to get the viewers’ attention and convince them to click through. The eBay listing is within the correct length, leading to the whole title being visible.

The keywords to optimise for

When we optimise a website and webpages for search engine optimisation, we always research thoroughly what keywords are used by searchers, and which are more likely to lead to sales. We aim to optimise for different keywords on the different pages so that the same website will not have two or three pages competing to rank for the same search query. The keywords also carry more weight the earlier in the title they appear. The words entered in the search query will also be bolded in the search results, helping your listing stand out. In the search example above for “LED torches”, the words LED, torch, torches and the synonym flashlight are shown in bold text.

Get them to choose you

Ranking on the first page of search results will have little value if you cannot convince the searchers to visit your website. It is essential to write with the readers in mind as well, not just the search engine formula. The title and description gives you a great opportunity to feature your key selling point or point of difference. What makes your product or company special, what benefit do customers get from choosing you?

Some extra tips

We recommend capitalising the first letter for the main words in a title tag. This both tells search engines that the word is important, while making them stand out. Keep in mind that capitalised letters do take up more space than non-capitalised, meaning that you will have less space to communicate in. Moz.com provides a good tool for testing out if the length of your title will be too long or not.

Meta description

At the moment, the Meta Description has no or very little impact on search engine rankings, but that does not make it any less important. The Meta description normally represents the subheading in you search engine listing, making it a great opportunity to convince the searchers to visit your website. Tell them what you do or sell on the various pages and the benefits of choosing you. We recommend adding a call to action, such as “buy today”, “order now” and so on. Write about the promotions you have, such as free shipping offers. Do not just write the same information as in the Meta title, as the readers will already know about this. As with the Meta title, the keywords used in the search query will be highlighted in the search results. So even if they give little value towards ranking you better, including them will help draw the attention of the searchers, aiding click through rates.

The Meta description has also limited space available for your messages. Google allows for approximately 155 – 160 characters, depending on the width of the characters. Capitalised letters also take up more space than non-capitalised.

Rich snippets

Want to stand out more in search results? Incorporating rich snippets in your website’s code will result in added information such as price, breadcrumbs, reviews and star ratings being visible in the search results.

In the above example, both listings are using rich snippets, but only the apple store are showing reviews and star ratings, making it stand out and more likely to be clicked. The Harvey Norman listing is only displaying the price in rich snippets, meaning that they are missing out on valuable opportunities to attract your attention.

Give us a call about how we can help you get a better natural ranking and stand out in the search results.

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3KITS is a leading Website Design and Development company in Hyderabad. Our company provides all services related to Web Design, Web Development, Software Development and SEO. 3KITS has the team of experienced Website Designers and Website developers in Hyderabad, India.

Web Design and SEO – Identifying the Areas That Can Impact Your Business Online

Companies adopt various marketing techniques to advertise their business among their prospective customers. Among all the techniques, online marketing is one of the best ways to reach out to your potential clients in a cost effective manner. Unlike the expensive television and newspaper advertisements, online marketing can yield long-term results, which will help you in achieving your business goals more efficiently in the long run.

All the online marketing techniques and strategies will boil down to one focal point, which is attracting targeted traffic to business websites. If you still do not have a website for your business, it clearly means that you are giving a free space for your competitors to eat into your business share. You will need to do something about it today.

Now the question is, “why are many businesses still unable to get customers in spite of having a website?”

Well, the answer to this question is quite complex. It is mostly a combination of reasons rather than one single reason that is responsible for poor results of your online marketing campaigns.

Let us look at a few of the important ones:

• The design of your website has many flaws
• Your marketing follow-ups are either ineffective or absent
• The quality of your content is way below the required standards
• You do not have a proper online marketing plan in place
• You have not explored the social media marketing option

In addition to all these reasons, there might be a few things that you might be doing wrong or unethical, in your pursuit of reaching out towards your prospective customers. Now, let us look into these issues individually.

The design of your website is flawed:

The design of your website has to ideally provide a smooth experience to your visitors. The combination of design, template, color combinations, font styles and sizes, usage of multimedia and widgets, programming of dynamic or interactive pages, and integration with social media are responsible for enhancing the user experiences. However, they should be organized optimally with a proper sense of user understanding.

The problem with amateur designers is that they tend to overdo everything, which will only end up in slowing down the performance of your websites. Your web designer should understand the core values of your business and your target audience, so that they can design the pages that will create a direct appeal with them.

Using of flash and animation optimally will surely help you in attracting the interest of your visitors. However, if you overdo that, it will backfire in more than one way. Primarily, the search engine crawlers will be unable to read the text that is embedded in the flash files. Of course, they will be able to read the file name.

Additionally, too much of flash will also slow down the loading of pages, which will end up in irritating your customers, and they will simply close your website and look up for other websites for help.

Also the font size and styles that you use should directly appeal to your target audience. For example, you cannot possibly use pink color on websites that sell man’s motorcycle jackets. The colors and fonts that you use should ideally create a feeling of familiar territory among your potential buyers.

Responsive website design:

You will need to remember that people these days prefer accessing internet from their smartphones and tablet PCs. The websites which look absolutely stunning on the PCs might not be ideal for small screens. Your website visitors might have to put up with a lot of scrolling and too small buttons, which could only ruin the user experiences on your website. Therefore, the web design should also be compatible with smaller screens and varying picture resolutions.

Changes and updates:

In most cases, your website design will be a onetime job, but you cannot overlook the scopes for changes in the future. Ideally, your web design should be scalable to accommodate the changes that you will need to make when your business grows.

Of course, you might not hit the winning formula on your very first attempt. The changes on your website are inevitable, one way or the other. The web designer whom you choose must be willing to understand this very important point, and must be competent enough to incorporate the changes according to various business scenarios.

If you are running an e-Commerce website, then you will obviously need to make constant changes, depending upon your sales and arrival of new products. In this case, your web developer should provide you with a user friendly admin control panel for managing your inventory in a very efficient manner.

Your online marketing follow-ups are either ineffective or absent:

It is not just enough if you have a business website with Home Page, Services Page, Contact Page, and About Us page. Targeted visitors to your website are like gold mine, and you will need to make all efforts to convert them as your customers.

In addition to the regular pages, you will require lead generation page, pages on social media networking websites, and preferably a blog, in order to bring about more awareness and participation from your potential customers.

While some of your visitors might be readily willing to do business with you, there will be a big percentage of them who need a little nudge from your end to help them with decision making.

You could convince them to sign up for your newsletters, which can be done by entering their contact information on your lead generation page. You could also send them to your blog to understand more about how you can cater to their needs.

The bottom line is that you will need to engage with all your probable customers in order to improve the sale conversion numbers on your website.

The quality of your content is way below the required standards:

The very meaning of the phrase ‘quality content’ has changed quite frequently in the past few years. What was considered as quality content before five years might be even considered as spam content now.

Website owners used to stuff niche related keywords in their content, just to appease to the search engine crawlers. Well, that used to work quite nicely in the past, and such websites might even have reached the top rankings. Black hat SEO and spamming techniques like Keyword harvesting and keyword farming do not work anymore.

People, who thought that they could get away by fooling the search engines, literally saw their websites disappear overnight, after the algorithm changes and updates from top search engines like Google.

Key points that determine content quality:

• Plagiarism is a cardinal sin in content writing business. Copying and pasting of contents from other resources on the net or anywhere else is absolutely unacceptable. You could get penalized from both fronts, which is from the search engines and copyright laws.
• Although using of keywords is an integral part of SEO for creating contents for websites and other resources, you cannot simply overdo it. Not only does it ruin the flow of your content, your website could also be a red flagged for spamming.
• While doing the keyword research, SEO professionals will come up with some types of keywords that simply cannot be used for framing sentences grammatically. Although such weird sentences have helped many websites in the past, search engines are becoming more particular about the quality of grammar used on the content as well.

Well, the bottom-line is that you will need to create your contents that add true value to the readers, rather than trying to attract the search engine crawlers. If you do it otherwise, the search engines will eventually find out about it, and then they will surely come down hard on you, which is by either demoting the search engine ranking of your website, or by banning your website altogether.

Good practices:

Create the contents that will help your prospective customers in understanding all about how your business can help them, or cater to their needs. If they have to buy your products or services, then you will need to give them all the good reasons for doing that. Make sure that you use the keywords optimally, and also make sure that they do not distort the quality of language that you use.

Some websites have great quality contents, but their promotional contents posted on other web resources do not maintain that kind of quality. You will need to be very consistent in delivering quality content to your targeted audience. In a way, it will market your business for a long time, and the reputation of your business will reflect on the type of contents you publish online.

You do not have a proper online marketing plan in place:

Some webmasters expect the traffic flow to magically find their websites, which is never going to happen unless they have proper marketing strategies in place. When it comes to marketing businesses online, the primary sources for getting targeted audiences are obviously the search engines. That is precisely why Search Engine Optimization or SEO occupies the big chunk of online marketing strategies.

Let us first put this fact into perspective, online marketing is going to be an ongoing process and not a onetime job. Even big businesses will need to market their products or services in order to stay ahead of competition.

Success of your online marketing strategies will depend on two things:

• Creating a professionally designed website, with all the ingredients needed to attract the search engines.
• Ongoing marketing strategies to attract new customers, and also to drive repeat business from the existing customers.

Aggressive marketing is very important, but there is a very thin line that separates ethical practices from the non ethical ones. You would expect your business to grow and expand in the long run, so you will need to make sure that the credibility of your business does not get hampered due to unacceptable marketing techniques.

You have not explored the social media marketing option:

SEO professionals might not have heard about social media marketing before 8 to 10 years. The reality is that the social media networking websites have now hit our lives like nothing else has ever before, and there is just no escaping them. Be it from their PCs or from their mobile phones, people are always indulging themselves in various social media networking websites.

Social media websites like FaceBook have even recorded 1 billion active users in a month. Such being the case, you can not afford to ignore the marketing potentials presented by the powerful social media platforms. Not only can you share information about your web pages on the social media networking websites, you could also share the contents that are published on other directories and web sources.

The best thing about social media networking websites is that your business information can travel virally, and reach many networks faster. You can bring about more and more awareness about your business products or services. Also, you can engage with your potential and existing customers, which will play a major role in growing your brand name in the long run.

Now, let us look at some solutions:

In this post, I have touched upon the points that are important for marketing your businesses online. The entire process, starting from choosing a domain name and designing your website, to marketing and promoting your business on the search engines and social media networking websites can be quite complex, especially if you do not have any prior experiences.

All these things are very time consuming, and you cannot possibly do them all by yourself. Therefore, the best option is to choose a reliable service provider, who will not only help you with developing your website, but also assist you with ongoing marketing campaigns to attract more and more targeted customers to your website.

Additionally, if they are able to create quality content for your website and other promotional material, it will surely be an added benefit for your business. It is always convenient to have a one point contact for all your business needs. All the above mentioned points will help you in making the right to decision while choosing a web designing company in Hyderabad that will also offer SEO services.

Looking to build a Website for your company?
Call +91-40-65891579 / +91-9030416219

Wesite - http://www.3kits.com/

Google + - https://plus.google.com/+3kitsWebdesign/
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Twitter - https://twitter.com/3kitss
Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/company/3k-it-services-pvt-ltd 
Blog - http://blog.3kits.com 

3KITS is a leading Website Design and Development company in Hyderabad. Our company provides all services related to Web Design, Web Development, Software Development and SEO. 3KITS has the team of experienced Website Designers and Website developers in Hyderabad, India.

Modern SEO Techniques to Drive Targeted Traffic to Your Website

Even though people spend a lot of their online time on social network, search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo are still the primary drivers of traffic to websites. Approximately 80% of traffic on the internet is due to search engines. Therefore, you can never forget SEO as part of your business strategy.

How does it work?

Search engines have existed for about 2 decades now, and many people know how they work. Up until a few years ago, SEO used to be a simple case of finding a few keywords and then building links based on them. This resulted in a lot of spam and low quality search results on Google.

Search engines have updated their algorithms to detect unethical SEO tactics. Most websites that used shady methods to increase their ranks on search engines were severely penalized. Here are some SEO techniques that used to work but do not anymore:

• Building links through link farms
• Building links through content farms
• Stuffing articles and web pages with keywords
• Building an excessive number of links in a short period of time
• Using various article marketing techniques and ignoring all other legitimate techniques

If you or your SEO Company adopted any of the above techniques, you might have seen a severe drop in rankings. Fortunately, there are better ways to optimize your website and make them more popular on search engines. Here are some techniques that do work.

Guest posting

This is a very recent trend and it has grown very popular over the last 3-4 years. Guest posts are published on websites and blogs other than yours. They have interesting content for readers of the website. Here is why guest posting can help improve your site’s rankings and increase your incoming traffic:

• The guest post contains links to your website that readers can follow
• Your website is exposed to a wider audience, which can drive further traffic
• Guest posts are usually of higher quality, which search engines like very much

Quality is the operating word here. Your guest posts need to be of high quality and the content itself needs to be genuine.

Blogging

Even though social network has supplemented blogging to a large extent, it is still the best way to increase readership. Social network posts are very casual and they are great for conversations. However, when you post blogs that have genuine and interesting content, people are more interested in reading them.

Here is what you should do with your blog:

• Find interesting content about your business niche to talk about
• Attract more readers with creative (outrageous?) titles
• Give readers some behind the scenes peak about how you work
• Offer advice to your customers about how best to use your product or service

Writing personal blogs shows readers that you genuinely care about them and in turn, they are more about you. It generates more interest in your website and naturally drives more traffic. Search engines like organic traffic and they will rank your blog higher than the other sites.

Facebook activity

Facebook is a constant in people’s lives. They use the network to find out what’s going on around the world. They use it to find interesting news and you can use this to promote your products as well. Posting regular discounts and offers on Facebook will garner more attention and drive traffic to your website.

To make the most of Facebook:

• Create a custom Facebook page that has similarities with your website in theme
• Upload videos and podcasts regularly, so people know you are active
• Respond to other people’s posts about your website and business
• Analyze how much traffic you get through Facebook

Many websites have found that their website traffic has doubled even tripled as a result of active Facebook optimization. As it happens, search engines are also interested in which websites are more active on Facebook, and try to increase their ratings if the content is of high quality.

Leveraging Twitter

Twitter is probably the most impactful SEO tool in the last 3 years. It started as a small status update network, but it has turned into a big tool for businesses to reach out to their customers. Tweets are short and they are more easily digestible for customers.

If you have interesting content for them, they won’t mind following your account at all. Here is what you can do:

• Create a custom Twitter page that reflects your logo and values (a design firm can help you with that)
• Use tweets to respond to user requests and comments
• Put out regular promos on tweets
• Upload images on Twitter that may be of interest to users
• Launch a marketing campaign on Twitter

People are looking for a consistent theme across various social networks. If you coordinate your social networking efforts through various services, you will be able to create a very strong brand, something that search engines will notice.

You will notice that modern SEO involves a lot of strategies that revolve around social media optimization (SMO). This is why you find so many SEO firms join these two aspects together when they offer their services.

Link building

Along with proper keyword research, link building forms one of the pillars of search engine optimization. The basic principle used by all search engines to gauge your popularity is still counting the number of links that point to your website. However, the rules have changed considerably over the last 3 years.

Here is what search engines want from your website:

• Backlinks to your website must be organic (and not part of an excessive strategy)
• Links should appear on quality websites (as determined by their PageRank)
• If many links are found on your website on link farms and content farms, Google and Bing will downgrade your rankings severely

High quality link building will lead your web pages to appear in the top 10 or 20 search results on search engines.

Using niche long tail keywords

People increasingly search on mobile devices. Earlier, people used to only look for information about certain topics on the internet. Today, they use it to look for:

• Products and services
• Nearby restaurants, movies and other places

Search is becoming increasingly localized. Therefore, if your business is based on Melbourne, you need to include those locations in your keyword research as well. Examples include:

• Web Designing Company in Hyderabad (rather than simply “red running shows”)
• Website Designers in Hyderabad, India

You need to use generic keywords as well as long tail niche keywords as mentioned above. This will help your website appear on top when people are looking for local places and businesses.

Upgrade your website

The last 3 years have seen modern web standards including HTML5 and CSS3 emerge. These technologies make it easier for search engines to parse your website content and index information. Upgrading our website is the single best thing you can to do increase your visibility on search engines.

Google is more interested in websites that are current and those who care about their customers being able to load websites. Flash-based websites are not accessible on smartphones and tablets. Your website will not rank as high as you want, if you don’t update it.

Maintain your links

As time goes on, many websites are simply not updated. Some websites go down. Even in existing websites, some pages are deleted. However, the links to these pages are not always taken down. These are called dead links and the resulting state is called link rot.

You need to ensure that all the links on your websites are active and that dead links are removed. You do not need to go hunt for individual links because there are many tools that can help you automate this process. Running through this process every week will help ensure that search engines always find your website to be high quality.

Update your website

Lastly, search engines want websites to be active. If your site is not regularly updated with new content, it is considered to be inactive and therefore of little value to search engine users. Keep your website fresh with new posts and design, so Google and other engines will index your website on a daily basis.

This way, users will also get the latest content on your website from search engines. SEO has indeed become a very time consuming job, but that is because there are so many factors in play. You might want to hire a reliable SEO company to help you form a concrete strategy.

Looking to build a Website for your company?
Call +91-40-65891579 / +91-9030416219

Wesite - http://www.3kits.com/

Google + - https://plus.google.com/+3kitsWebdesign/
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Twitter - https://twitter.com/3kitss
Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/company/3k-it-services-pvt-ltd
Blog - http://blog.3kits.com 

3KITS is a leading Website Design and Development company in Hyderabad. Our company provides all services related to Web Design, Web Development, Software Development and SEO. 3KITS has the team of experienced Website Designers and Website developers in Hyderabad, India.

Reducing Load Time Through Image Optimization

Time is priceless. So, each one of the entire human race tries to reduce wastage of time in every step of their life. Though there are numerous internet users who switch to broadband each and every year, a huge mass of the web's population is still continuing with the old dialup connections. Therefore it is imperfect to count them in the equation when you are about to design your website. A major point with this regard is the loading time of your website due to the dial up connections which users must be taken as an important cause. 

Generally, the entire text on your website will be loaded just within a little time even in case of a dialup connection. But this does not happen in major cases as the main and foremost cause of slow loading is mostly because of the large images size on the website and it is necessary for you to maintain balance between the usage of images to attract users with the increase in overall loading time as unnecessary usage of large size image may hamper the loading time of your website. Thus you should be careful to optimize every image on your website to make it sure that it loads in the minimum time possible. What really meant over here is to use image editing software in order to remove unwanted information on your images which in turn will effectively reduce the file size of the image without affecting its overall appearance.

If you Photoshop personally, it will be very much clear to you that when you save an image in JPEG format then a dialog box appears asking to choose the ‘quality’ of the image. Generally a setting of 8 to 10 is enough to preserve the quality of the image while you are saving it in a small size file. There are various free image compressors are available online which you can download to use if you won’t have Photoshop to reduce file size of your image. 

You also have another option where you can save the image in PNG format or GIF format so as to get the best quality at the minimum possible file size. What the editing software do? The image editing software clips and removes all the color information which is not used in the image, thus providing the smallest possible file size. But due to GIF format the appearance of the image may often compromise, so think a bit wisely before making your choice.

Thus to reduce loading time it will be better not to use unnecessary image in your website rather than using image editing software. 

Remember, your goal in a productive disagreement isn’t to beat the other person but to choose the best path forward together.

Looking to build a Website for your company?
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3KITS is a leading Website Design and Development company in Hyderabad. Our company provides all services related to Web Design, Web Development, Software Development and SEO. 3KITS has the team of experienced Website Designers and Website developers in Hyderabad, India.

Disagreements can be productive

In the world of business,disagreements with peers and team members about the best course of action are inevitable. These disagreements can be productive, or they can turn negative and become relationship- and results-killers.

Here’s how to make sure your disagreements are productive:

• Make the necessary deposits. If you want to have productive arguments with your peers, your team and maybe even your clients, you need to have already made “deposits” toward those relationships. Unless and until your intentions are known, disagreements may feel personal and political. But if your intentions are known and your relationship is strong at the start, then arguments and disagreements can actually help you produce better results.
• Don’t make personal attacks. It bears repeating: If you want to have productive disagreements, you cannot turn them into personal attacks. Your argument needs to center on the best choice to produce the outcome over which you are arguing. Avoid making personal attacks against the other person. If she has made mistakes in the past, leave those mistakes in the past. Confine your disagreement to the matter at hand.
• Accept that others’ intentions are good. You cannot have a productive disagreement while also questioning the other person’s intentions. If his intentions are bad — if what he is arguing for is immoral or illegal, for example — you cannot have a productive disagreement. But if you’re arguing over the best course of action, then assume the other person wants the same outcome you do.
• Have a clean heart yourself. If you want other people to treat you as if your intentions are good, you too must have a clean heart. You cannot have a productive disagreement if what is really driving your argument is what you stand to gain. Assume others have good intentions, but also make sure your intentions are above reproach.
• Find a path you can agree on. And here’s the thing about productive disagreements: You don’t win by winning the argument. You win by discovering the best path forward and gaining agreement to pursue it. I’ve had relationships with partners who were willing to concede to the person with the strongest feelings. They valued the relationship as much as the outcome — and that is at the heart of a productive disagreement.

Remember, your goal in a productive disagreement isn’t to beat the other person but to choose the best path forward together.

Looking to build a Website for your company?
Call +91-40-65891579 / +91-9030416219

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3KITS is a leading Website Design and Development company in Hyderabad. Our company provides all services related to Web Design, Web Development, Software Development and SEO. 3KITS has the team of experienced Website Designers and Website developers in Hyderabad, India.