Improve Search Engine Rankings With Meta Tags

Are meta tags still important?  You bet they are.  I know that a lot of people think that meta tags are a waste of time - but they're not.  Having properly formed meta tags are essential for search engine success.

Title tag.  Make sure your title tag includes your keyword phrase and is not more than 60 characters long.

Description tag.  Include your keyword phrase no more than two times and make it compelling.  This is what prospective site visitors will see when they see your site listed on search results.

Keywords tag.  Include your most important keyword phrases in this tag but do not include any more than 12 keywords.  Doing so may be considered keyword stuffing.

Robots tag.  Give search engines a reason to crawl your website.

By using meta tags properly, you can tell Google and other major search engines what your site is about and what information users will find when they visit.  Don't overlook simply yet highly effective meta tags when properly formatting your website for search engine success.

All About Meta Tags

Are you familiar with Meta Tags? If not, here's a quick definition: Meta elements are HTML or XHTML elements used to provide structured metadata about a Web page. Such elements must be placed as tags in the head section of an HTML document. Meta elements can be used to specify page title, description, keywords and any other metadata not provided through the other head elements and attributes.

The most common meta tag is your title tag which appears all the way at the top of your website browser window in the upper left hand corner. My recommendation for meta tags pretty simple and have worked for me when optimization my websites.

Title Tag
Begin with a well structured title tag that includes your keywords. Try to keep your title tag short as this provides more weight to the words you've included. Longer titles are less effective.

Description Tag
This tag is important because it describes your web page. More importantly, this description is seen in search results. So you want the description to be both accurate and catchy. It needs to encourage users to click through to your web site.

Keywords Tag
Don't put too many keywords in your keywords tag. I like to limit the number of keywords to around 12 which are the most important to your page. Focus on delivering only your most important keywords through the keywords tag.

Other Elements
Robots tag, verification keys, etc. can all be part of your meta data. Some webmasters include other information like authoring data and so on. Don't get carried away. I have found that by including the basic tags you're doing more than enough.

Meta Tags Can Help Your Organic Search Results

It is widely believed in the search engine optimization community that the title tag is the most important on-page element for obtaining good search engine rankings. Despite this belief, it is amazing how many websites do not include title tags at all on their pages or use non-descriptive title tags such as YourDomain.com or just the word "Homepage". Although not thought to be as important, the meta description also plays in important role in obtaining organic traffic. Not surprisingly, many websites fail to include meta descriptions on many or all of their pages.

Loading up the title tag on a web page with relevant keywords and phrases will help that page rank better in the search engine results pages when someone queries those words and phrases. It is also important to keep in mind that most search engines display the title tag in their results as the linkable element. Most search engines will bold keywords in the title if those keywords are used in the active query. This draws the user’s attention to those listings and further increases the chances of a click through.

Before you add every keyword related to your industry into your title tags, you should know that Google will currently only display up to 66 characters in their listings and Yahoo 120 (note: these numbers can change at any time). Also, if the title looks spam to you, it probably also looks like spam to the search engine. If you limit your title tag to less than 120 characters and keep the keyword relevant with the content of the page, it is unlikely that you will have any page penalization problems. Also, consider putting your most important keywords near the beginning of the title tag. As an online retailer, this means putting the brand or manufacturer of the product that you are selling as one of the first keywords in your product detail title tag. Brands are widely searched and ranking well for them can be a boon. Finally, as another best practice, make sure each page on your site has a unique title.

Meta Descriptions are often, but not always used under the linkable portion in the search engine results pages. As with the title tag, it’s a good idea to include many relevant keywords in the description as those are also often bolded by the search engines. Putting compelling copy in your meta descriptions can also increase the likelihood that your result will be clicked. As with title tags, make sure every page on your site has a unique description.

Title tags and meta descriptions are often overlooked because they don’t display in the content area of the browser. Although they are just one piece of a well optimized page, taking the time to add them can have a profound impact on the amount of organic traffic you receive from search engines!