Interesting reply from my website guy after he reviewed this thread: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hi Mike,

A few things about SEO:

1) The only page that had a "This is a test description" META description tag was the home page. We updated that. I can show you how to do this. All other pages read the first lines from the body and use that as the description.

2) META tags, including the description and keywords, haven't been relative to SEO for a long time (over 7 years). Keywords are completely ignored. The gentleman who suggested this, does in fact use META keywords on his site. Interestly enough, he does not have a META description tag on his site at all.

There is a long history with this, that basically had to do with web developers spamming META tags. Since META tags are not shown to the visitor, developers would put stuff like "Watch Game of Thrones FREE, Mila Kunis Bikini" in the META keywords. (Most of these were the latter type.)

Sometimes they would even use a competitors name and slogan in there, to game the search engines to show the wrong page. As such, these keywords have been ignored from search engines for many years.

Instead, search engines now use the VISIBLE content (the stuff actually displayed to visitors) to index your web site. This was a great move for the ethical web developer, and the person utilizing the search engine.

If you're interested in the history behind this, there is a good article here: https://www.firstscribe.com/blog/shouldnt-we-be-using-meta-keywords-internet...

It may be that the gentleman who provided these suggestions had his site developed prior to 2009, during which time his suggestions would have be on point.

3) Some search engines will use the META description tag when displaying results to visitors, to provide the small excerpt you see under the link. Google already filled this text in, when looking at your site, with actual content that the visitor sees.

4) There are things you can do to optimize your page for search engines.

- Mostly, this includes putting key phrases or words into the actual content of your site. Stuff that is in <title> or heading tags <h1> through <h6> is given a higher weight. We've tried to create your site with these things in mind.

- Another SEO practice is to have your stylesheets, javascript, etc... loaded from another file as opposed to be inline. This is because search engines may only index the first X number of characters or bytes while reading your page. We took care in making sure that the relevant content is near the top of the HTML code. Keep in mind, content you see near the top of the page, may be farther down in the code, and vice versa. There are rules we use to position things on the page, that don't necessarily correlate to where that content is within the code that the search engines read.

- Inbound links from relevant web sites will increase your ranking. For example, a link to your site from a Dog Agility web site, will do nothing to increase your ranking. So, avoid the temptation to cross link with just anyone. Inbound links from a web site dedicated to reviewing estimating software applications WILL increase your rank.

I agree with needing a better description of what the application actually does. Let me know when you come up with something. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

On 2016-12-16 13:12, Ted Roche wrote:

Gene makes a good point.

While the site is "pretty," you've got a ways to go to optimize the Search Engine Optimization features. The meta tag for description says "This is a test description." and there doesn't seem to be a keywords meta, which can also carry some weight.

For reference, my site, which is hardly SEO-optimized, has:

<meta name="keywords" content="HTML5, CSS3, Responsive, Mobile, LAMP, Linux, Apache, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Python, Perl, PHP, Ruby, Rails, software development, consulting, New Hampshire, New England, LUG, visual foxpro, sourcesafe, linux, foxpro" />

because "Will code for food" sounds a bit desperate.

The body text as well should say "FABMate is a software service to provide estimating to the mid- and large-scale manufacturing and fabrication industry focused on medium and large construction widgets" or whatever it is it does.

At a minimum, I recommend you sign up with Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools and follow some of their recommendations on promoting your site.

On Fri, Dec 16, 2016 at 11:58 AM, Gene Wirchenko genew@telus.net wrote:

...

At 13:00 2016-12-15, mbsoftwaresolutions@mbsoftwaresolutions.com wrote:

...

http://mbsoftwaresolutions.com

Check it out...all comments welcome!

 I took a quick look.  It is pretty, but it fails big time in what 

I consider a key area.

 What do your products do?  The "OUR PRODUCTS" tab should tell 

that. Instead, there is a bit of an answer hidden in "ABOUT US". If I had not decided to hit all the tabs, were I a potential customer, I might have skipped to the next Website.

 If I have never heard of your products -- and I had not -- how 

would I find out what they do?

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko

[excessive quoting removed by server]