Unloved, But Still Important: How To Leverage Meta Tags
Ive put together a multi-part series covering important aspects of SEO. If you are new to SEO, these tips will help you build a strong foundation for obtaining SEO traffic. For those of you who are more advanced in SEO, my hope is that youll pick up a tip or strategy that you arent currently employing in your own SEO campaign.
In the first part of the series Ill take a look at important on-page HTML elements that can influence your SEO rankings.
Unloved, but very important META tags
The META tags are arguably the most important on-page HTML elements when it comes to SEO. META tags consist of three tags that reside in the of your HTML code and should be found at the very top of your page.
META title tag. The Title tag acts as, you guessed itthe title of the page in question. This tag helps the search spiders understand the theme of your page. For those that are unfamiliar with search spiders, spiders are essentially scripts of code that the search engines use to crawl and identify web pages that exist throughout the Internet. In the search engine results pages (SERPs), the title tag is the topmost hypertext link for each search result.
Notice how the spider was able to identify the presence of the keyword macbook. Having keywords present within your Title tag helps associate relevance between your page and the search query. Having strong keyword density in your Title tag will also boost your ability to rank for your targeted keywords. When writing your Title tags be sure to be concise and speak directly to the content contained within the page.
Keep your Title tag to a maximum of 70 characters (Google will only cache up to 70 characters). Limiting your Title tag to 70 characters will also force you to think more carefully about which terms to include in your Title tag.
The Title tag should be uniquely customized for every single page within your site.
Title tag code example:
Apple – MacBook – The $999 notebook, completely redesigned.
META description tag. The Description tag also resides in the tag of the HTML code. This tag surfaces in SERP results directly under the Title tag and offers you a space to elaborate on the pages theme. Ideally, the Title and Description tags should follow each other thematically.
The Description tag should be limited to 155 characters and should also be keyword rich (closely tied in with the Title tag). As you can see in the example above, the spiders was able to identify the presence of the keyword macbook in the META description.
The Description tag should also be customized for every single page within your site. However, for larger sites you can opt to use a schema to strategically build out your Meta descriptions.
Description tag code example:
META keywords tag. The Keywords tag has been largely ignored by the major search engine (Google, Yahoo, MSN) spiders for the last several years. In the early days of SEO, the spiders used this tag to help categorize sites and rank them based on keyword relevancy. As you can imagine, spammers took advantage of this loophole and keyword-stuffed this META tag with unrelated high-trafficked terms in order to increase their site traffic.
The keywords META tag does not appear in the SERP results (it only resides in the HTML code of your site). So should you completely ignore the Keywords META tag? Its really up to yousome say there is no reason to neglect this META despite search engines largely ignoring it (search engines tend to be fickle creatures, constantly changing their algorithms to thwart spamming attempts). If you are already making an effort to optimize your Title and Description tags, it will not hurt your site to optimize your Keywords tag as well.
If you decide to optimize your Keywords tag, dont go overboardinclude just 6-8 keyword phrases that are closely tied back to your META description and META title (which should in turn accurately reflect your pages content theme).
Keyword tag example:
META tags play an important role in your sites success with SEO, mainly by helping the search engines identify the theme of your web site. The key takeaway when setting up META tags is to remember to be concise and consistent (at the page level). Stay tuned for the next installment in this series.
Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.
Source: searchengineland.com