Writing Your Tag Line

Hopefully after reading my last two posts, you are on your way to writing a tag line. Don’t have one yet? Don’t know how to write one you say? It’s not always easy.

Herefordshire Canoes has allowed me to use them as an example. If you look at their home page you will see they have a tag line, “Canoes, kayaks, fishing boats, inflatables, paddles, equipment” in great big text. It looks more like a keyword list to me. A good reminder here is to design/write for visitors not search engines. Playing the search engine game came be a difficult task, if this was their intention, and I would simply not play it.

An Example

Here is a great method, search engines like it, and it will read well for your visitors. If they had used, “Canoes, Kayaks and Inflatables”, we would still be able to quickly understand what the site is about, the search engines would get it, and your site would be a little more readable. Why? Because it is short, and it’s to the point. One of the other reasons you want make a short is because it can easily be used as a common anchor tag. Canoes, Kayaks, and Inflatables makes a much better link than “Canoes, kayaks, fishing boats, inflatables, paddles, equipment”. An ideal link should make the anchor text match the title of the link page. Herefordshire needs to take advantage of this. If they were to link to their fishing canoe page, their title should match with “Fishing Canoes”, not “Herefordshire and Borders Canoe Kayak – Fishing” like it currently is. Keywords will match, and visitors are not confused by mixed messages.

So How do You Write One?

So here is what I like to do when coming up with a tag line. I first write a brief, three to four sentence description of the site. I really work on it, making every word count. Then I edit it down to just two sentences. At this point you should really like it. You should even be able to use this as your introduction message. A little hint here. If you look at Herefordshire’s site you will see the word “Welcome” in their introduction message. Welcome would not be a valuable word to a tag line or an introduction message. Seriously use every word as if you are paying for them. At this point it’s still to long though, so now it is time to edit it down to just one short sentence.

By the time you have it down to one sentence we can throw out the grammar, and really define your site to just a few words. Best Web Image, Web Usability and Design. Herefordshire and Borders, Canoes and Kayaks or Canoes, Kayaks, and Inflatables.

A Little Credit

On a final note, and to give Herefordshire a little credit, the tag line “Canoes and Kayaks” is in their logo. A good choice as far as I am concerned. The reason they have created a second tag line on their home page though, is because their more brief tag line was in graphic format. Search engines can’t read it, and that is not good if you are trying to get search engine traffic. My suggestion, make the tag line match the logo and lose the confusion. Density for your preferred keywords will also improve.