What are meta tags and why should you be interested in them?
There are four things about your webpages that influence google when it’s ’spidering’ your site and deciding where to rank you in it’s search database,
- Your domain name
- Page meta tags
- Page content
- Link popularity
I’ve talked about registering and choosing SEO-friendly domain names recently in choosing your domain name. You would be surprised at how much importance google places on relevant, keyword-based domain names.
Meta tags are hidden HTML tags embedded in your webpage between the <head> and </head> tags. And there are three tags you need to edit for every webpage on your site,
- Title
- Description
- Keywords
The title tag is by far the most important and shows up in the bar at the top of your browser. It’s inserted between <title> and </title>, should be short and include your primary keyword for the page.
If you don’t know your keywords, read my recent post do you know your keywords. But lets suppose you have a domain ‘cureyouracne.com’ and your primary keyword is acne treatment plus two secondary keywords adult acne, acne cure. An excellent title would be,
<title>acne treatment reviews and comparisons</title>
You want to make sure the title contains your keywords and it entices your reader to click through to the website, as google displays it on the search results page. It must be short. Google only displays 60 characters.
Not so important, but you should still include it, is the description tag. In our example choose a good, concise description that, ideally, contains your secondary keywords. For example,
<meta name = "description" content = "discover acne treatments that work - reviews for adult acne and acne cures">
You may need to play around with this as there are three occurrences of the word ‘acne’. But then it does contain all three keywords.
And the least important tag is the keyword tag. It is not really used by search engines anymore, but I recommend you still add it. In our example,
<meta name = "keywords" content = "acne treatment,adult acne,acne cure">
And make sure you do this on every page of your website. It’s a chore, but each of these techniques add more weight to your optimisation. It’s a case of ‘the whole is greater than the sum of the parts’.
0 responses so far ↓
There are no comments yet...Kick things off by filling out the form below.
Leave a Comment