Chapter 14
Positioning Statement
What's your positioning statement?
In Chapter 12, I encouraged you to visit your competitors' websites and get keyword ideas from their meta tags. We talked about how the “meta name” source codes of a website list the keywords the site is targeting and give a site description. The previous two chapters were all about the keywords. This chapter is all about the description. The description listed in the meta tags is the website's positioning statement. Every website needs a 15- to 25-word positioning statement. It forms the foundation of the entire website. You need a focus and your positioning statement gives you that focus. In just 15 to 25 words (usually 160 characters or fewer), the statement needs to tell people exactly what you do. Sounds a bit like an elevator pitch, doesn't it? Absolutely. In fact, your positioning statement is just a shorter version of the 75- to 90-word elevator pitch. (Another format—your title tag—is even shorter, at 65 characters or fewer. We'll get to that in a second.)
Where do these statements show up? If you do a Google search for anything, the organic (meaning unsponsored) listings are displayed in the center of the search results page. Every listing includes four lines of text. The top line has the primary title you would click on to visit the website. Below that, you'll find a two-line description telling you what the page is about, and the fourth line provides the actual URL for the page. If you've added a 65-character ...
