News & Views

Getting organized: a meta data template for SEO

ThinksoCreative_SEO_MetaData_Cheat_Sheet

Process and organization are important ingredients in a successful professional services firm — and essential to being set up for future growth. In one of my favorite business books, The E-Myth Revisited, author Michael E. Gerber states, “A Mature [sic] company is founded on a broader perspective…a more intelligent point of view. About building a business that works not because of you but without you.” Thus, it’s been Thinkso’s mission from day one to put processes in place that 1) institutionalize individual knowledge and 2) ensure consistency and best practices for every aspect of our projects.

I’d like to share one small example with you in the hope that it’s helpful to your web marketing process and, more specifically, taking the first step toward SEO.

The Thinkso Website Meta Data Template (which you can download here) is a simple form that we use to ensure our designers, developers and clients are all on the same page with nomenclature, URL naming, title tags, and all the other meta data associated with each page of a website. We’ve put examples and guidelines for writing each of these items right on the spreadsheet so that no matter who in our studio is tasked with the assignment, as well as clients reviewing the form, understand and follow our methodology.

A note about this data and SEO: The page title tag, URL and meta description tag are important to SEO. Meta keyword tags are less so. But having the keywords in your page code puts them in a handy place to reference when creating content for that page; keyword use in page content is important to SEO.

Interested in other SEO info? Check out my post from the Confab Conference in May.