Two Brothers Web Design Connecticut CT - Hosting - Free Proposals - Email Marketing - Search Engine Optimization

Meta Tag Optimization

By Dawn Rowlett
Search Engine Positioning Specialist

Meta tags are not nearly as important as they used to be in "Old School" SEO, but they do still deserve and need proper attention.

Meta tags are contained within the <head></head> area of your pages.

The most important Meta tags will include your title, description and keywords. These should be the first tags on the pages.

Irrelevant tags such as meta author and meta generator, can confuse engines and make other areas of your meta tags appear to be less relevant. Eliminate any irrelevant meta tags.

Title Tag

<title>Your Sites Title Here</title>

Your title tag should be the first META Tag shown within the <head> of your page.

Your title tag is going to be one of the most important areas of your page that your keywords should be placed in.

Your title tag should contain your most important keyword phrases for the specific page that the title is on.

In most cases, its best not to repeat words in your title.

Titles should contain approximately 15-65 characters. The search engine and the competing market will play an important role as to exactly how many characters are going to help boost your rankings.

Stop words such as "A", "The", "And", "With", etc. Should be avoided in titles.

Punctuation should be used sparingly -- only when they are needed to make a title appear to make more sense or appear more professional.

Good marketing sense says that the first letter of each word of the title should be capitalized.

Description Tag

Your description should only describe the content of the page that the tag is on.

Not all search engines will use your description for ranking purposes. Some will use it as the description of your site -- others wont consider it for any purpose at all.

People should be enticed to click on your site by reading your description, but marketing hype and biased words should be avoided.

Depending on the engine you are targeting, consider adding your keyword phrase toward the middle of your description instead of the beginning. This seems to be especially helpful when trying to get a page ranked for a competitive keyword.

Descriptions should be approximately twenty-five words depending on the search engine that will use this description and the reason they are using it.

Proper grammar should always be used in your description tag. Only begin each sentence or proper nouns with capital letters and use proper punctuation.

Keyword Tag

<META Name=“keywords” CONTENT=“keyword phrase here, another following, followed by more”>

Most engines no longer put much relevancy on this tag. However, it does help to use it for those that do.

Only list keywords here that are relevant to the page this meta tag is on.

Do not repeat a word more than three times within a keyword tag.

In most cases a keyword meta tag should contain no more than four or five phrases.

Do not use words such as "A", "The", "And", "By", "With", etc.

Commas can be used to separate words from one another such as...

search engine optimization, web site marketing, website ranking

Not using commas can sometimes increase the chances of being picked up under variations of phrases. This is normally only useful if your string of keywords can produce multiple important phrases to use such as...

internet marketing website online promotion services

Do you see how a much wider variation of words can be used here? The keywords that this page might get listed under would be:

Internet Marketing
Marketing Website
Marketing Website Online
Website Online Promotion
Online Promotion
Online Promotion Services

So, instead of listing all of these words separated by commas, space can be conserved and additional options are available by listing them as a string of words.

Robots Meta Tag

The robots meta tag is used as a command to the spiders so that they know what to do when encountering a specific page on your web site.

If the command instructs the robot to "index", then your page will be spidered.

If the command instructs the robot to "follow", then the spider will follow the links from this page.

If the command instructs the robot to not index a page, "noindex", the spider will NOT spider this page.

If the command instructs the robot to not follow, "nofollow", then links on this page will not be followed.

Only one set of commands should be given to the robot. Decide which commands to give and place that tag on the corresponding page of your web site.

Each page of your site should contain a robots tag. If it does not, there is no need to worry as long as you want the pages to be indexed. The robots tag is simply a prompt so that the spiders know what YOU want them to do. If you don't have the tag at all, your pages and links will still get indexed and followed.

Ending...

While meta tags certainly are not the most important aspect of search engine optimization, they do still offer useful information to the spiders and should be crafted properly.

If you are using a "meta tag generator" to create your tags, be sure to proof them thoroughly before placing them on your page. Some automated generators have a tendency to leave room for error.