To continue my research on how easy (or hard) it is to find phone numbers for businesses that one would put in an address book, I searched for my optometrist. I knew her name and location, so I did a google search. I used the following search phrase, “Kam Rancho Cordova Optometrist”. The results were disappointing. I found her practice in a yellow pages directory listing titled “Kam and Ching”. I knew she had a partner, so I guessed this might be it. It took several clicks and an obscene amount of pop-up ads, but I finally located an address and phone number. The address was different than I expected, so I continued searching.
After reading through a few more results, I was able to determine the full practice name for Dr Kam. The name I found was “Lori D. Kam, O.D. and Stephen K. Ching, O.D”. I copied and pasted these words in the Google search bar and found something quite interesting. The practice has a website. The website URL is http://kamandchingoptometry.com/.
If the practice has a website, why did it take 4 searches to locate it? Why was it necessary to enter the full, wordy practice name before I got a meaningful search result? I did a view > source to view the assorted search meta tags. Web design 101 teaches us that a search engine uses 3 tags to index a website.
1. The page title. This all-important tag should provide the user (and search engine) with a meaningful description of the page. Example: Dr Kam’s title tag looks like this:
<title>Lori D. Kam, OD & Stephen K. Ching, OD - Home</title>
2. The keyword meta tag. This is where you would put a list of words that one might use to search for you. Dr Kam would likely choose the words, “Rancho Cordova, Optometrist, Dr Kam, Dr Ching, Lori Kam” and so on. Example: The meta tag would look like this:
<meta name=”keywords” content=” Rancho Cordova, Optometrist, Dr Kam, Dr Ching, Lori Kam “>
3. The description meta tag. This is what the search engine would use to display in the search results. This is where I recommend that the business’ address and phone number should appear. Example: <meta name=”description” content=” Lori D. Kam, OD & Stephen K. Ching, OD . 2248 Sunrise Blvd. Rancho Cordova, CA 95670 . (916) 638-3878 “>
What did I find for the above-mentioned tags when I did a view source?
<title>Lori D. Kam, OD & Stephen K. Ching, OD - Home</title>
<meta name=”keywords” content=”">
<meta name=”description” content=”">
As you can see, the keywords and description meta tags content values are blank. This is not acceptable. I happen to know that this site was created by a “Business to Business” company that provides an assortment of services to Eye Care providers. I found several other sites created by this service that had the same results.
Lessons Learned:
If someone is paying you to create a website, make sure you don’t cheat your client. Make it easy for your client’s customers to contact them by providing meaningful values in the meta keywords and description tags.