Meta Tags and title description

[Ravenfire]

Whats the best way for me to make sure on my sites that I am using the best I can in these sections? For my Mumszone site in particular there are so many similar sites around that I wonder how I will ever get a better ranking with google (used to be a 4 and for some reason dropped to a 3 a couple of months ago :( ) Im wondering if this could be caused by a problem in my meta tags etc?

Thanks

Toni

[mattk]

I'm not sure what you mean about being a 4 and dropping to a 3, but these are my suggestions for your site:

Page titles: These are very important. On your homepage your page title is:

Mumszone - Home

Change this to something like:

Mumszone - parenting and pregnancy discussion forums, articles, chat rooms and competitions - Home

Then for example in the Site Articles section, instead of:

Mumszone - Site Articles

have:

Mumszone - parenting, pregnancy, baby and health issues articles and information - Site Articles

Page titles are used extensively by search engines and having descriptive titles will help your rankings no end!

Page Headings

On your homepage you have the heading "Welcome to Mumszone" - this is good, but in your code you should wrap this text with h1 tags. This tells the search engines that it is a heading and it is the main heading for your page, therefore the search engines will give more value to that text. Do the same on subsequent pages - so on the articles page you have the title "Mumszone Site Articles" - wrap this is h1 tags.

For some reason in your code you have 2 sets of title tags - I'd strongly recommend you remove the second set of tags.

Without being funny, a half decent Web designer should have done all this - and more - on your site in order to optimise it, but there you go!

[Tin]

Matt, I'm 'guessing' that Toni means PR when referring to "4 and dropping to a 3" as the home page is currently PR3. I often hear people who say they have a ranking of 4 when what they really mean is a PR of 4 and no ranking but they seem to confuse the two somehow. Not implying that you're confused Toni :-)
In general I agree again with advice from Matt but IMHO you should use the 'Description' area of the head to briefly describe your page and not the Title element which needs to be shorter and more focussed.
Either way, putting something in other than what you have would benefit you :-)
Just wondering, can you make html changes yourself instead of having to run them by your site designer? If so, PM me and I'll be happy to provide some very specific advice on the topic.

[Ravenfire]

Thanks both for your replies.

The problem is I use Joomla and I am not sure that I can actually change some of the headings that you mentioned Matt, but will go and have a look just to make sure.

Sorry yes I did mean PR4 gone down to PR3 and its ok I can be a fluffy blonde a lot of the time and get confused with regard to things like this, but Im willing to learn and really appreciate your help.

I dont actually have a web designer I did it all myself (apart from my logos and header graphics which is done for me) :( and the pages arent html because of it being Joomla.

Toni

[Tin]

No probs Toni :-) If you do find that you can add/edit bits that Matt and I mentioned then by all means PM me and I'll happily provide detailed advice specific to your website.

[Tin]

oops Toni, meant to say 'free advice'

[mattk]

Ah, good old Google PageRank. I read this on another site and think it is very apt:

PR is vanity, ranking is sanity ;)

[Tin]

not being ranked is Insanity :wink: