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The Member Section of the Chamber Website
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Tony Thornby (Living Streams)
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BEING FOUND & STIMULATING ENQUIRIES
The Background
Over the last 2 or 3 months, Living streams has donated some search engine optimisation (SEO) to the Marlow Chamber of Commerce to improve its website's search ranking (primarily with Google).
The net effect of this has been to put the Chamber's home page into the top 10 results for searches of Marlow, Marlow retailers, Marlow consultancies, Marlow trade, Marlow commerce, Marlow businesses and Marlow business services. Membership of the Chamber has therefore increased in value considerably and this article has been written to guide members on how to take maximum advantage of the high rankings.
Membership Details (in the Chamber website)
Most members have the names of their company, the company phone number, their website URL and a company email address in the website directory of members. N.B. The last is critical is you want to receive messages sent to you from your company's page in the website.
Missing Details
But quite a few member's details do not yet include:
(1) 'Position' information - this field is used to categorise businesses and is therefore extremely important in allowing people who don't know your company name to find you
(2) 'Contact Image' - which for most companies would be their logo
(3) 'Miscellaneous Information' - This is the prime entry to persuade someone who finds you on the Chamber website to pick up the phone or click on your website link
When your Chamber member Page is found in a Web Search
Living Streams added Google Analytics to the Chamber website a month ago. One of the key early learning points from the data consequently now being gathered is that many visits to the website are from searches for member companies or their owners. It is therefore important that what the web user sees as your Chamber entry in their search results makes them want to click the link.
Rather than leaving the choice of text to the search engines, you can help them by populating two tags which are in the non-visible coding at the top of each webpage - the title tag and the description meta tag. Living Streams has now fitted software which allows the content of these two tags to be set separately for each members Chamber webpage.
Guidance on tag content:
(1) the title tag should be no more than 70 characters, including spaces, and your company name should be near the front of this.
(2) The description meta tag should be no more than 150 characters, including spaces. It should include your lead contact's and your company name
(3) Make it read well - it's for humans first and search engines second
Any tag content should be emailed to me at using the contact form on my Chamber member entry.
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Web Wise
