So you’ve made it to page one for your keywords – excellent!  In order to have done that, then chances are that you already have an idea of how you can use keywords in the head elements of your website for maximum search engine placement.  But have you ever thought of the human factor?  Have you put much thought into how the placement location of your keywords in your title and Meta descriptions will play a factor in the amount of times a user clicks your results?  In this article, Andrew Hallinan will cover how your keywords will be most effective for the human element.

Reader, I want you to think about something for a second.  When you search for something on Google, Yahoo!, or Bing, what do you look at first?  What grabs your attention first?  Do you ever really think about this?

Google has thought about it!  Google’s User Experience Research team has discovered a way to actually track a person’s eye movements and focus when they are looking at a search results page.  Watch this video for an example:

Based on the research that Google has performed, we’ve learned that people mostly read the search results page in the order that the search results have been listed – top to bottom.  Searchers will generally start top down and scan the results until they find something that they feel will be useful – and then BAM!  They click the link and make a decision to check out that website.  (Sometimes the searcher will decide to revise their search terms, but that’s information for another blog post at a later date.)

After 34 different users were evaluated Google had a pretty good idea of what they were looking for when evaluating the search results page.  Check out this heat map image below – a great image which helps show where people looked at the longest.

Google Heatmap Study

What can we learn from this?

1. Searchers will scan the results top down

Duh!  Most people already knew this – the best place to be for your search terms is on page 1, in position 1!  This study certainly verified what we already knew.  But there are some other conclusions that we can come to that will greatly effect how our website will perform once displayed on the search engines.

2. Searchers will notice the first few words in your title and snippet first

Ah, now we’re getting somewhere!  Look at the site map again – where did users spend the most time?  Searchers spend the most time looking at the left side of the page reading the first few words in your title and the first few words in the snippet.  This is important!  If you want to maximize the human response to your search engine results, it’s utterly important to have your most important keywords in the title – FIRST!  It’s equally as important to have your most important keywords in your Meta description tags – FIRST!

If the user spends more time looking to the left of your results, then it’s important to meet them where they are.  Considering that Google will bold the keywords that match exactly the search terms, if you give them what they are searching for in the first few words of your title and description, you’ll have a much better chance of succeeding and getting their click.

Business Management Basics does what it states; gives you the basics for small businesses success.

After 20 years in corporate business and 12 years running his own furniture manufacturing and exporting business Steve Coleman has been through it all.

From learning the basics and with the unstinted help and knowledge of business friends, he put together a very profitable business, sold it and retired to Costa Rica three years ago.

All his business knowledge is practical and with much research, he has put together Business Management Basics to help small business owners get started on the road to business success.

Here he gives back some of the knowledge and experience gained from over 30 years in business, in a practical and useful manner.

Knowledge is power, in this case business power.

Steve Coleman can be contacted through his Web site www.businessmanagementbasics.com

Using innovative approaches, advanced methodologies and a small, talented staff, supplemented by specialists from our strategic partners, Abacus Consutling Group provides scalable business solutions to help companies achieve success.

ACG has been providing internet consulting, strategic marketing, branding, web development, web design, system integration and many other business consulting solutions for B2B, B2C and B2E since 2000.

Our approach stems from the three most important business growth aspects: helping companies reach prospects, assist in converting prospects to customers, and assist in retaining those customers. This is accomplished through our interactive solutions and expertise in providing a memorable and positive user experience.

Our proven expertise in strategy, design and technology allows us to create business solutions that excite and inspire, are easy to navigate, and enable businesses to strengthen their competitive advantage.

We pride ourselves on our ability to quickly adapt, master and leverage emerging technologies to meet and exceed business goals. For example, we’re currently working on several groupware sites using the social networking capabilities of Elgg.

ACG’s founder and president, Paul Stewart, has over twelve years of experience in the software industry and has worn a multitude of hats including developer, systems administrator, project manager and strategic consultant. Most recently, Paul served as senior developer for the Volpe Center, the research and technology innovation arm of the United States Department of Transportation. Prior to that, Paul served as Webmaster for Perot Systems, supporting their contract at Tufts/New England Medical Center in Boston.

1. Don’t use the Whitehouse.gov’s website as an example for your robots.txt file

Now-a-days, if you don’t disallow the search engines from indexing your website, they will default to indexing it.  There’s no real need to “allow” Google, Yahoo!, or Bing to access your website – the will by default.

If, however, you wish to keep the robots off of your website (maybe during development, a redesign, or whatever), use the following in your robots.txt file:

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /

This will block Google from indexing your entire website.

To make all of the search engines blocked:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Now, in some cases you’ll want to block the search engines from indexing only a specific directory or subdirectory on your website.  Here’s what that’ll look like in your robots.txt file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /yoursubdirectorynamehere

Make sense?

Now, here’s a hint – if I were you, I’d make folders on my server before the development of my application that were for “allow” and “no_allow” folders.  This doesn’t necessarily benefit the search engines, but the alternative is having a 200 line robots.txt file  that mirrors the stupid robots.txt file found on the previous Whitehouse.gov robots.txt file.

2. Disallowing a cached version of your website

If you don’t want the search engines to send a searcher to the search engine’s stored cached version of your website, you would use the following meta tag:

<meta name=”robots” content=”noarchive”>

Generally, webmasters use this in cases in which a page is constantly updated and refreshed, and the previous copy that might have been stores on the search engine is no longer applicable to the searcher.

3. Controlling Snippets

I bet you don’t know what a snippet is, do you?  A snippet is the couple of lines of words that are displayed under your website’s title on the search results.  Sometimes it comes from your meta description tag, but often times, it comes from a snippet of your page that Google deems relevant.  It’s been proven that when Google produces these snippets, people actually click your link more often because they see how relevant the website will be.

However, there are times when you simply want Google to obey – and to display exactly what is contained in your search engine results snippet.  For example, if you are a newspaper and your website is updated several times a day, Google may not have time to re-index your website, and so your snippets would be detrimental to your click through rates.

In that case, here’s what meta tag would look like:

<META NAME=”GOOGLEBOT” CONTENT=”NOSNIPPET”>