Welcome to another installment of 10-minute branding!
10-Minute Branding Refresher: How do you build your brand 10 minutes at a time? You start small, and you simply begin. An excellent way to convince yourself to get going is to plan your ending. You can even set a timer. Then, be sure to bask in the success of your huge accomplishment of actually beginning and also appreciate the amount of work that got done. Then, repeat the process tomorrow. And the next day. And so on. You will be amazed at your branding progress . . . 10 minutes at a time.
SEO or Search Engine Optimization, in a nutshell, helps your web site be found online.
The very first step is to make sure search engines know your web site exists. Or, more specifically . . . check whether your web site is indexed. If you haven’t already done that, click on over to this article (Make Sure Your Web Site is Included in Search Engines’ Index) and put aside this post for now.
A great second step is to review your web pages’ titles. (Read that story here.)
Next up . . .
META DESCRIPTIONS
The web page description is another component of “meta tags” that can communicate important information about the page to your visitors.
If you’ve done a good job writing your “meta description,” that content will be displayed when your page is listed in a search engine’s results underneath the title. For example . . .
This “snippet” (as google refers to this text) can determine whether a visitor clicks through to your page. However, google will automatically generate a snippet from your page’s content and virtually ignore your description if it doesn’t meet google’s criteria, bringing us to . . .
BEST PRACTICES FOR “SNIPPETS,” ACCORDING TO GOOGLE
- Create a unique description for each page of your web site.
- Include important information from your page, even if not in sentence format.
- Some do’s and don’t of quality descriptions:
- Don’t just list keywords; a home page should explain what your business does and include details (such as hours and location).
- If the page is selling a product or service, do provide specific information.
- Do summarize the content of the page.
- Don’t be too short or generalize.
- Use the meta description tag (see below).
| An Example of the Meta Description Tag in Action in Your HTML: <html> <head> <title>Brand Building for Small Business</title> <meta name=”description” content=”A Blog for Entrepreneurs Looking to Create and Develop their Corporate Identity.”> </head> |
OPTIMAL DESCRIPTION LENGTH
While all of google’s best practices may suggest a weighty description, google will actually only display 155-160 characters on search results. Therefore, you have the lofty goal of incorporating a wealth of specific information in as few words as possible.
ONLY 10 MINUTES A DAY
You might be questioning this approach at this point, thinking, I already spent 10 minutes just reading this article! If so, you’re done with your 10-minute branding exercise for the day! Come back tomorrow prepared to get started on executing the task. Once you reach 10 minutes, save your work and come back the next day!
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