Three Column Themes

Our three column themes are created with your visitor in mind. Online shoppers are used to looking for product categories on the left, products in the middle and their shopping cart on the right.  Of course, our themes are widget friendly and you’re certainly welcome to arrange the shopping cart widget and the other widgets anyway you want.  You’re also free to switch out the header image and play with the css as much as you want.

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Early on I realized that the name dew point productions had it’s draw backs. Like a lot of business names it was chosen in part for personal and emotional reasons and in part for being brandable. The tagline and name work well together and it’s memorable. It just doesn’t play particularly well with search engines.

As can be seen by the fact that it shows up so well for many keyword terms it’s intended to show up for, it is obvious that the name vs, search problem can be overcome. All the same here is how it is a disadvantage. Every time someone searches and clicks on the site as a search result for something totally unrelated, like the dew point in portland oregon, they leave the site in under a second. This leads to a higher bounce rate and a reduced average time on site rate. These are factors Google takes into account when determining how good your site is and how high they should rank it. You might be able to whine and complain about how unfair this is, but that will get you nowhere.

Instead of complaining consider what you can do to help yourself and the search engines. On this site it has lead to a lot less referring to the company by the company name, this works out fine for the most part. A lot of sites have an over reliance on the use of the company name in the Title tag, meaning their title tag structure is always <title>Company Name >>Service or Product</title>. In our case we stay away from this. People who are looking for our Company will find a page with it in the title tag, but certainly every title tag doesn’t incorporate it. Another option is to use images for some text. We used to have text in our banner now we let the company logo speak the company name and since this is an image it is invisible to search engines.

Take a look at the keywords you’re being found for, do they all serve you well? Are there some you want to get rid of? If so, try some of the above techniques they may serve you well.

If you already know what a meta tag is, skip this paragraph, if not here’s a little background. Meta tags give search engines information about your site, but are typicaly invisible to human readers when they are looking at your web page. They exist in what’s know as the head section of your webpage and if you didn’t build your own site you may never have seen them at all.

Two meta tags that have been abused quite a bit for the purpose of improving search rankings are the keyword meta tag and the description meta tag. The keyword meta tag has been thought to be being ignored by search engines for some time. It turns out that this is not 100% true. A friend did a test using fictional words like upmertopft and put them in the keyword tag of several sites. In fact I participated in this little study and added such words to a couple of my sites. He then let the whole thing cook for about 60 days before searching the search engines for these words. It turned out that while none of the sites showed up in either Google or MSN for the word they did in Yahoo! Just to be clear the words appeared no where in the text or other tags so this is the only way it could have been picked up. How much weighting does Yahoo! give to this? I don’t know and I wouldn’t suggest spending much time on this tag because the effect is probably tiny. Set it once with your company name, most important keywords and miss spellings of those keywords and forget it.

The meta description tag is a completely different story, and here’s why. It is generally held that the meta description tag is no longer used as a factor in determining what keywords your page will rank for, but that’s not the end of the story. Your meta description tag is often used by Google and other search engines as the description that users see under the title when they land on a search engine result page. This little fact makes them important for how well you rank, at least in Google.

You see one of the factors that determine how well your page ranks in Google is how often it is clicked on when it does turn up as a search result for a query by a Google user. The more often your page is clicked on instead of the pages above and below it, the higher it rises. This may seem a bit unfair, since it is well known that the higher a website is on a search result page the more likely it is to get clicked on but the fact remains it is listed as a ranking factor in Google’s patent.

So what does this mean for you and using your meta tags? Don’t spam up your meta tag with a bunch of keywords that wont help you get placed higher and it may turn off potential visitors. Instead take the time to write a quality description for each page. Make sure it is accurate, descriptive and intriguing. It should leave the person browsing wanting to know more.

The thing is in my way of thinking a great or even a good tool needs to be a time saver and this just isn’t. Since you have to enter the two urls you are going to be looking at those pages, is the content the same. Then you better make some changes. Now if this tool allowed you to do 10 or 20 urls that might be a time saver. The best idea though is just to keep your content original and then you don’t need to worry.