Mind your Meta Data – how hidden web copy impacts social media success

Making your website marketing-ready is one of the keys to make the most of free. A site that doesn’t have the basics right can seriously limit your ability to maximise the social media and online word-of-mouth opportunities that now exist for businesses large and small.

We firmly believe that when you can’t out-spend the competition, you have to out-think them.

But, to do this you need the right tools and the discipline to maintain a little website house-keeping. A key element in website build that impacts your ability to do this is the Meta Data, which is often totally unseen, but always totally crucial.

You need to make sure that you have the following:

• A Favicon
• Meta Titles
• Meta Descriptions
• Meta Tags
• Sensible URL structures

Favicon – what is it and why do you need one?

A Favicon is the little icon that appears in the tab of a web browser when you have a few pages open in one window. With most web browsers now allowing people to have multiple pages open at a time with ‘tabs’ to swap between them, Favicons have become best-practice. They help people to quickly navigate between the tabs that they have open in their browser. Not having one makes your site look unprofessional in comparison – and being as people are likely to have your site open alongside others, there really is nowhere to hide on this one. If you don’t have a Favicon, the browser will default to showing an empty white box, as shown on the far right tab on the image below.

Top tip on Favicons: Get the image created on a transparent background so that it looks good against the grey of a browser window. It looks a bit naff if your image is on a white square cut-out.

Comparison of a site with and without a Favicon

Meta Titles – what are they and why do you need them?

A Meta Title is a crucial piece of copy. When you are writing copy for your web page, you need to make sure that you also write a one-liner suitable for this purpose. This is the copy that sits in the Tab or Window header on your browser. It is also picked up in social media, like Facebook and LinkedIn, when you post a link. So, if you have this right, it means that whomever shares a link to your page, the same title will pre-populate as the details are shared virally. I’ve pointed out below where the Meta Title has been picked up automatically. If you have no data, this will appear blank when it is shared in this way.

Top tip with Meta Titles: Make the the first 110 characters self-contained, so that they can be used effectively on Twitter with space for a URL or Re-tweet.

Posting a link as news in LinkedIn

Sharing a link on Facebook

Meta Descriptions – what are they and why do you need them?

Meta Descriptions are longer pieces of copy that don’t actually appear anywhere on the page in question. They only come into play when a search engine is indexing your site, or when your pages are shared in a social media setting. On the images above we’ve pointed to the Meta Titles, the Meta Descriptions can be seen in the boxes below the Titles, where a longer description is shown.

Top tip with Meta Descriptions: Write the copy so that it stands alone. As you’ll see above, when it is shared in social media settings, the copy appears on its own and needs to make sense in and of itself.

Meta Tags – what are they and why do you need them?

Meta Tags are keywords related to a particular page. Search engines use them to help work out what the page is about. Site search functions often use them to help find content within a site, and you can also use them to create ‘Tag Clouds’ on your site. Tag clouds are a collection of words (your tags) that grow in size the more you use them. When you click on the word in question, you’d see a list of all the pages with that word attached.

URL structures – what makes sense and why is this important?

URLs are the strings that you put into your browser to reach a specific page on a site. On less well built websites the URL structure can be a little clunky, generating URLs with strings of random numbers. Search engines, and human beings, appreciate things that they understand. You need to make your URL make sense for both. Having an intuitive URL is also useful for when you want to put links on direct mail, or on the footer of your emails, so that they are broadly memorable. A string of numbers can be more than a bit off-putting.

A URL structure can also help people to understand where they are in your site. Levels of navigation should be reflected in the URL so that people know where they are. For example company.co.uk/section-name/product.

Top tips on URL structures: Never leave spaces or use symbols (£@&*%) in your URLs. If you leave a space, hyperlinks look very strange as they will fill in with % where there’s a space. If you use symbols you’re likely to cause errors, so our advice is just not to do it.

Usability and Search Engine Optimisation

Ooh, and the elephant in the room here is SEO. Meta Data is an SEO fundamental. These tips are mainly about the marketing-readiness of your site. But, it is also worth noting that they all also impact on the usability and search-friendliness of your site. Your Meta Data is completely visible to a search engine. Use it to promote your keywords as part of a search strategy, but make it also make sense to real people because in a social media setting your Meta Data is exposed for all to see.

Top tip here is that you need to be able to set Meta Data for each and every page, not across the whole site. And, you need to include it as a requirement in your brief to a web copywriter when you’re having web copy written.

So, when you’re getting a website built or enhanced, have a really good think about your Meta Data. Getting it right will help you to make the most of the free marketing opportunities that exist in the socially-networked world in which your business now operates (whether you like it or not).

By Bryony Thomas | Chief Clear Thinker | Clear Thought Consulting Ltd | www.clear-thought.co.uk

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• Blog: B2B Social Media; Be There, Be Relevant, Be Proven »
• Blog: One piece of content, 20 ways to use it »

Clear Thought Consulting works with small businesses, equipping them with the marketing strategies, suppliers, skills and set-up that they need to become bigger businesses. We do this at the fraction of the cost of recruiting into a full-time position by delivering one-off strategic projects, hands-on training, marketing support, and out-sourced marketing departments. We firmly believe that when you can’t out-spend your competition, you have to out-think them.

Published on 16 February 2010