SEO Help: Meta Tags Titles, Descriptions & Keywords
The “meta tags” are a very important part of your web page. They are read by the search engines but are not displayed as a part of your web page design. Usually they include a concise summary of the web page content and you should include your relevant keywords in them. The most important tags are the title, description, keywords.
META Titles
A title tag tells both users and search engines what the topic of a particular page is. If your document appears in a search results page, the contents of the title tag will usually appear in the first line of the results
Tips & Guidelines:
- Accurately describe the page’s content. Choose a title that effectively communicates the topic of the page’s content
- Create unique title tags for each page. Each of your pages should ideally have a unique title tag, which helps Google know how the page is distinct from the others on your site.
- Use brief, but descriptive titles. Titles can be both short and informative. If the title is too long, Google will show only a portion of it in the search result.
META Descriptions
A page’s description meta tag gives Google and other search engines a summary of what the page is about. Whereas a page’s title may be a few words or a phrase, a page’s description meta tag might be a sentence or two or a short paragraph.
A meta description should be no more than 150 characters, and be a relevant summary of the page itself. Think of it like what you would say in one tweet about the page. If you can repeat the description somewhere on the page, that’s good too.
Recently, Google has been creating the meta descriptions for websites automatically if they are missing, or if they simply think they can do a better job. Either way, you don’t want Google writing your meta descriptions for you, so try to come up with something relevant, and worthy of a click at the same time.
Example: Brandon’s Baseball Cards
PAGE TITLE: Brandon’s Baseball Cards – Buy Cards, Baseball News, Card Prices
META DESCRIPTION: “Brandon’s Baseball Cards provides a large selection of vintage and modern baseball cards for sale. We also offer daily baseball news and events in”
META Keywords
Read More: Google DOES NOT use the keywords meta tag in web ranking,
It is true that Google does not use keywords meta tag in web ranking, however it is still beneficial for other search engines.
The keyword tag provides keywords for search engines to associate with your page. In other words, keywords describe the content of the page, the words that people would enter in the search engine as a keyword if they were looking for this web page. This META tag will help improve the search engine to locate the page in question.
Current thinking is that when it comes to keyword tags, less is more. Overloading your keyword meta tag with many keywords only reduces their impact on your rankings. List all the keywords your main clients might use to search for your web page. Then use only five to seven of the most relevant ones on each page, and use different ones to describe the content of different web pages.
Tips & Guidelines:
- Terms should be in plural form where possible.
- Use a comma “,” to separate each and every word you enter as a keyword if not they will be considered to be all one word.
- Keywords should all be in lower case for the search engines to be able to find them better on the pages.
- Do not span the keywords or search engines will ignore that META tag. Spanning is repeating the keyword. An example of spanning keywords would be: University of Alberta, Alberta, University, the University of Alberta.
- When preparing keywords, keep your audience in mind. Anticipate how they will search for the page.
Example: ualberta.ca
university, alberta, edmonton, canada, students, undergraduate, graduate, programs, academics, applications, teaching, research, alumni
Sources:
Ryan Kelly in Search Engine Optimization, Sitejuice, July 5th, 2010
Google’s Starter Guide Search Engine Optimization 2012
Government of Canada Internet Guid: Metadata
