I wonder if the Website Designers at Target have read SEO Made Simple. According to this book, one of the first lessons on search engine optimization is that meta tags play a very large role in the Google ranking competition. There are four basic meta tags: Title, Description, Keywords and Robots (Fleischner, p. 21). I decided to take a closer look at some of Target.com’s meta tags.
On Monday, June 7, the source information at Target.com showed the following listed as keywords: patio furniture, furniture, gardening tools, swimwear, baby, electronics, toys, bedding, shoes, sporting goods, shop online.
I went to Google, searched for patio furniture and found Target.com on page 2. Next, I typed in gardening tools and found Target.com on page 8. After that, I did a search for toys and found Target.com towards the bottom of the first page in the 9th spot. Target.com ended up on page 3 when I searched for swimwear. For some reason, I expected Target to be on the first page of every search.
Moving on, I found that the source information for the Title meta tag at Target.com showed the following: Target.com & dash; Furniture, Patio Furniture, Baby, Swimwear, Toys and more. The content of this title is nine words and 63 characters including spaces. Basic guidelines indicate that a title tag should be no more than seven words and less than 60 characters including spaces (Fleischner, p. 22). Each word in the title tag is weighted by Google, so too many words in the title will result in diminished importance of each word. When the title is longer than 60 characters it will run off and be finished with trailing dots. Target.com is over the limit on both of these recommendations; however, I found the title was presented in full on my Google search.
Meta tags are just one part of search engine optimization, but Target should take a closer look at their keywords and title. Maybe some adjustments would help them improve their Google ranking. On the other hand, maybe Target is so well established in both the online and offline community that they don’t need to worry about search engine optimization. Either way, reading the book couldn’t hurt.
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I definitely agree Angela!
ReplyDeleteI compared Target and Tide for our Meta Tag Discussion Question, and was so surprised with the results!Tide was definitely "better" than Target. (with Target being SO large, I would have thought they would have been on top of this)
Target may definitely feel that they do not need to change/fix anything since they are so established - but that is not a wise decision!
Maybe we should send a copy of "SEO made Simple" to their executive team!! :-)