Oct 22 SEO Advice – Meta Tags & Keywords

Meta Tags

SEO is sometimes made out to be a lot more complex than it actually is. When you first start researching the topic, the amount of information available on it can make it seem like you need some kind of advanced training to be any good at all at SEO. This couldn’t be further from truth. While it does take a lot of time and dedication to be great at SEO, it’s not rocket science and with a little bit of time invested into research you can be OK at it. Right now I’m going allow you skip over some of that research and give you some of the knowledge I’ve gleaned over the last few years to give you some basic tips on meta tags a keywords that you can use to improve your site rank now.

There are three types of Meta Tags

• The Meta Title Tag
• The Meta Description Tag
• The Meta Keyword Tag

All Meta Tags can be customized yourself and doing so is the easiest way that you can improve your search rank. The Meta Title Tag or simply Title Tag is the words that appear at the very top of your browser. Title Tags should be unique for each web page on your site and no longer than 70 characters. You want your title tags to have keywords in them that you want people to find that page for. The title tag should also be descriptive of what is on the page, like the title of an article. A good title tag for a shoe seller’s homepage might be, “Tennis Shoes, Sandals, Boots, High Heels, Loafers | Bob’s Footwear”. I can be useful to use the “|” character or pipe to separate out ideas. Here’s a good article on title tags if you’d like more info.

Google Keyword Tool

When choosing keywords think about what people would actually type in the search bar and think about what they would type if they were searching for your business or service. In the above example I included the keyword “tennis shoes”. Another word for tennis shoes is sneakers. You want to know what people are typing in a greater volume – tennis shoes or sneakers? How do you find this out? You can use a keyword research tool like Google’s for AdWords, which is free. Type in a keyword or keyword phrase and the tool will churn out a bunch of results similar to the keyword and the keyword itself. In general you want to choose the keyword with the greatest search volume, but another factor to consider is the competition. How competitive is that keyword? If it’s high and you have a small site, you may want pick a similar keyword with lower competition.

Onto Meta Descriptions. Meta Descriptions should be a couple of sentences or between 150-160 characters. Meta descriptions are not seen on your page but do show up under links in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). Meta Descriptions should be succinct descriptions of what is on the page and have some important keywords, but not be loaded with them. They should be readable by a human being as a summary for what is on the page. As with title tags you want to included some keywords that work well for your purposes and that you’ve researched to be the most effective. Using the above footwear example, a good meta description for that page might be, ” Bob’s Footwear. Premier seller of affordable shoes for men and women. Specializing in tennis and other athletic shoes with a comfortable fit for every sport.” That description is keyword rich, readable by a human and exactly 159 characters. It would work well .

Finally there is the Meta Keywords tag. Google has said that this tag is not even considered by their bots and is basically useless. I rarely use it, but if you want you can throw in a few keywords relevant to the content on the page.

I hope this information has been helpful and you have a better understanding of meta tags and keywords. If you’d like to hire an expert firm to do top notch SEO work for your business or website, or to build or a rebuild a SEO friendly website then give The Ad Men a call or fill out the form to the right. Thank you.

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