Meta Tags

The secret to high rankings is writing keyword-rich tags, right? Well, yes and no.

Meta tags have always played an important role in search engine optimization; however, they’re still just one part of an overall strategy to achieve high rankings. But employed correctly, they can certainly help clarify what pages should be ranking for which keywords, and increase rankings for those keywords accordingly.

Here, we’ll examine three types of SEO meta tags: title, description and keywords:

Meta Tag Title
The title is the most important of all of your tags. As the search engines attempt to figure out what the page is about (i.e. what keyword queries best match the page), they rely on the title more than any other factor. The title appears on the top bar of your browser, as well as in the clickable link on a search engine results page (SERP). This is a great place for two to three variations of your top keywords, but be careful not to overdo it. Just as you wouldn’t want your on-page content to look like spam, you don’t want to keyword-stuff your title tag!

Meta Tag Description
Unlike the title tag, the keywords in the meta description don’t hold quite as much weight; however, this doesn’t make this tag any less important. The meta description appears under the title tag on a SERP – it’s the two lines that describe what the page is about. In essence, it’s an advertisement, and it’s often the reason someone decides to visit – or not visit – your site.

This description should be short, descriptive and enticing. It’s the perfect place to advertise a special offer or sale. The question to ask yourself when writing your meta description is: what will make people choose to visit my website over the other page results that offer the same product or service that I do?

Google automatically bolds any keyword phrases that match the search query, so it’s a good idea to include a keyword or two in the description. This is a quick way for Web users to see that your site’s content matches their keyword phrase – and therefore is relevant to their needs!

Keywords Meta Tag
This once-popular tag used to be a good way to tell the search engines what keywords to rank for; all you had to do was place your keywords in the keyword tag. However, this feature made it all-too-easy for spammers to abuse this feature and now little to no emphasis is placed on the keywords tag. While it certainly doesn’t hurt to place keywords here, it won’t necessarily help either.

Want to learn more? Type some of your keywords into Google and study your competitors’ title and description tags. And, as always, feel free to contact Web.com Search Agency at 1-877-Rank-321 if you have any questions!

Meta Title SEO Tips

People in the field of Search Engine Optimization are known for varying opinions about most SEO practices, but there isn’t much debate about the title tag, because a properly written web page title can literally change your rankings overnight. Several other factors have to be in play, such as having an established and trustworthy site with sufficient links from other web pages, but we have gotten surprising results for several clients with the right title tag.

Also known as the “meta title” by some, titles often have to be explained to novices and new SEO clients. For people using Microsoft Windows, we usually direct people to look at the wording in the browser window to the left of the button that minimizes the page. In many cases the original designer may have used such descriptive titles as “Home,” or “index.html” or the company name in all caps. Since search engines use titles to classify your on-page content, “home” will lump your site in with 208 million sites that use the same word.

How Many Characters?

Normally the first 60 characters in a meta title are important, since search engines like Google truncate the remainder of the title. Note that spaces, dashes, pipes, and ampersands count as characters. You can write longer titles, but should try not to go beyond 120 characters. Remember that the web page title defines the subject, and should be concise.

How to Arrange Keywords in Your Title

The arrangement of keywords in your page title is going to have an influence on search engine positioning. Whether you are doing optimization on a shoestring or a full budget, the homepage title should be about the most general subject matter relative to the site, and the most high volume keyword should be used. You can find high volume relevant keywords using the Google Keyword Tool, or you can use your biggest traffic terms in your sponsored search platform. Normally you can repeat a word or phrase once in the title. If you have a site that sells comic books, you might arrange your best keywords in a format like:

Comic Books Marvel & DC Comics For Sale Graphic Novels

Separating keywords with commas is not recommended, since it may look like you accidentally inserted your keyword list into the title, and you may incur a spamming penalty. On some sites the company name is inserted before the keywords in the title. While there may be a small positive impact by moving the company name to the end of the title, every little bit helps in the world of SEO.

Preventing Keyword Blurring

A full scale SEO project will involve unique meta titles on as many pages as possible. This actually involves careful planning, since similar or identical title information will keep search engines from selecting the best page. If Google sees several pages with the same category information, it will either try to pick the best one or it will give them all a lower placement than any single page would have gotten. For the comic book example, you would have more specific information on category level pages (“Spider Man Comic Books”) and detail pages ("Amazing Spider Man #37 – Spidey Tangles With a Robot.") This type of detail helps a search engine create a hierarchy, and increases the number of site pages that match up with specific customer searches.

Another cause of keyword blurring in titles involves default titles that are defined in shopping carts and content management systems. If you are unable to create unique titles for multiple pages, making the default title into something generic (like your company name) can prevent blurring.

Dynamic Title Insertion

Have you got several thousand pages on your site, or multiple products for sale? If people are searching for items by part number, dynamic keyword insertion into your title can dramatically improve your exposure and sales volume. This requires some programming, since you are effectively inserting a variable (most likely your short product description) into the title tag. Most often, you will want some static text to go along with the dynamic text, so the code would look like:

[part number] Printer Ink Refills – Inkjet Replacement Cartridges

Depending on whether your page code is PHP, ASP, or Cold Fusion, this would be an “echo” command or a similar method of writing the code and rendering it as HTML. You may also want to see if your CMS or shopping cart has a plugin that does this for you.

Agreement with Page Content and Links

Anything that goes in your title should be reflected on the actual page. Search engines want to match up titles with content, which still has a high value to most search algorithms. One warning is that your header (h1) tags should not match the title exactly, or the page may get filtered for over-optimization. Similarly, links to your page should contain anchor texts that match up with title elements, but naturally the link texts themselves should be carefully mixed to prevent problems. If you have an entire batch of anchors that match up with the first phrase in the title, then you may encounter problems. As always, an experienced SEO company can advise you on page optimization.

Conclusion

The value of web page titles cannot be underestimated in the world of SEO. A well known survey of search engine optimization experts showed that the title is still the most important consideration in on-page optimization. Although the title should not be the only thing you do for your website’s SEO profile, it is one factor that will prevent your site from ranking if all other best practices are already in place. We have seen multimillion dollar companies with atrocious page titles, and they were getting beaten by mom-and-pop shops with better optimization. Anyone trying to grow a website’s online presence should consider the status of all the web page titles on their site, and how much traffic that good titles can bring.

Note: We have a meta tag generator that turns text tags into HTML code that can be pasted onto a site. To use this as a title generator, the other fields can be left blank.

Meta Tags and Search Engine Optimization

Note: We have a free Meta Tag Generator for DIY SEO Enthusiasts . This article does not show actual meta tag HTML because the examples were confusing the blog software template. You can see some meta elements here.

For people who are just getting started in the website optimization world, meta tags are generally the first element addressed in the SEO (search engine optimization) process. Unfortunately, they are sometimes the only SEO attention that a site gets, which is unfortunate, since metatags alone won’t create rankings. SEO professionals do not hold metatags in high regard, despite the basic importance of having good tags. This is because there are many other elements that determine search engine rankings, like on-page content and links. However, the right meta tag choices will definitely improve your search engine standings.

First and most important is the Title tag, which doesn’t use the word “meta” in its HTML designation, but is part of the metatag group given that it is written at the same time as other tags. Proper title tag writing has a significant impact on search engine rankings. In some cases, all you have to do is change your title to get better search engine positions. There are many multimillion dollar enterprises that have not caught on to this fact. Normally the first 60 characters of the title tag will show up in search engine results above a description or snippet of page content. The most important keywords should go near the beginning of your title, especially on the homepage.

Second is the Description tag. This should be a concise (between 200 and 250 character) description of the page contents and your business. A snippet of this tag is likely to be used in search engine results, although the search engine has the prerogative to grab any piece of text on your site for the snippet. Make sure to use the page’s most important keywords in the description, and write it so it grabs a reader’s attention. A description tag should have sentence structure, and should not be a list of keywords separated by commas.

Third is the Keywords tag. The keywords tag should be a list of keywords separated by commas. It should not be longer than 500 characters, but you should assume that the search engines aren’t going to care about the keywords tag anyway. This is because people abused the keywords tag when it first came out. We have noticed that Yahoo still reads the keywords tag (we found this out when we put common typos into the keywords tag, and nowhere else, and the pages got indexed in Yahoo) and even a fractional amount of traffic can sometimes bring in good sales. From an SEO standpoint, many people leave the keywords tag out entirely, with no ill effects, but it may still have an incremental value. In general, put keywords in order of importance, and don’t repeat any keywords in the list or you may be suspected of spamming the search engine.

For the first three metatag categories (title, description, and keywords) it is important to prevent duplicates. Each tag should be unique. Titles should be relevant to each page’s content. Descriptions can have a single unique sentence at the beginning and a common tagline for the next two sentances, but ideally they should be 100% unique. If you are monitoring your site in Google Webmaster Tools, Google will indicate duplicate descriptions and titles. These should be addressed as quickly as possible. If you have a site with several thousand pages, there are ways to use dynamic insertion to make each title and description unique.

There are multiple other meta tag designations, like rating, author, city, state, and copyright, which may be used by search engines, but aren’t treated as highly as other tags. If you are going to use a “rating” tag, it should be appropriate for the content, so you don’t exclude people from all-ages sites and you do exclude them from sites with profanity or adult content. There is a revisit-after tag, but normally we don’t recommend using this one because you may be telling search engines to only look at your site periodically, which means that it takes longer for changes to your website to get noticed.

Some metatags can hurt you if they are not used correctly. If you have a “robots” metatag that says “noindex, nofollow” then search engines are going to ignore every page that contains the metatag. If you use meta refresh tags on pages with minimal content, your site could be mistaken for having “doorway pages” which are an old SEO trick that creates serious penalties for your site.

Sometimes a meta tag is necessary if Google or Yahoo is showing a site description based on your listing in the Open Directory, or DMOZ.org. Normally this description is not up to date, or may be very brief. The way to fix this is with a “noodp” tag which tells the engines to use your own meta description or a snippet instead of this tag.

The big rule for meta tag usage is to make sure that the tags match up seamlessly with the content you have on the relevant webpage, and with the links that are pointing at your site. The title tag, above other tags, describes what the page is about, so it should match up with actual searches for your product, service, or message. Properly focused meta tags improve rankings and click volume. Consistency goes a long way with people and search engines, since the engine gets its credibility from serving up accurate results, and people will jump off a site (or “bounce”) if they don’t see what they are looking for. By having the right metatags based around the best keywords, you can increase traffic, make more money, and build your brand in the search engines. Even though metatags are just the first step in the journey of search engine optimization, they will have a definite impact on everything that comes afterward.