Meta tags are influential search-engine ranking factor
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Written by Anders on August 11, 2008 – 8:02 am
Optimize Title Tags
Title tags are an extremely influential search-engine ranking factor. What you place in your Web page title tags has a substantial effect on where and for what terms your page ranks. Just as importantly, the first thing a human visitor sees when finding your page on the search-engine results is your title tag. Title tags should be descriptive of what your Web page is about and compel potential visitors to visit your site.
The title tag is possibly your most important consideration when you try to raise your searchengine rankings for a particular keyword or phrase. Search engines use the text contained within the title tag as a primary factor to determine what the content of a certain Web page is about.
The text that makes up your title tag is also the clickable link text that typically appears on the search-engine results pages when your site appears in the rankings. Title tag text also appears at the top of a Web browser when someone is visiting a particular page on your Web site. The title tag is located in the header of an HTML document and its syntax is as follows:
<HEAD>
<TITLE>The title of your Web page</TITLE>
</HEAD>
The title of your Web page
Limit your title tag to 65 characters or less because most search engines do not display any more than that. Your title tag should be a concise statement summarizing the main point of your content, and should be compelling enough to entice search-engine users to click the link text and visit your site. Additionally, your title tag must be unique for each and every page of your Web site and should include the one or two keywords you want the page to rank for.
If you are building a Web site for a business, include the company name in the title tag. If your company name is already well known, search-engine users may try to find it; having the company name in the title tag facilitates that process. If the brand is not well known, including it in the title tag with the key phrase or phrases that describe the field in which it operates provides an opportunity to present that company as an authority in the field.
To increase relevancy for the keywords or phrases that you have included in your title tags, consider naming your files based on those terms. Your Web page’s file names should relate very closely to those pages’ title tags. Also, when you link from one page to another on your Web site, your link text should be closely related to the title tag of the page linked to.
If those links contain link text that is closely related to the title tag of the page on your Web site, the major search engines are likely to conclude that your Web page is relevant to those terms. Be mindful to create unique title tags for each page of your Web site. Due to the ranking influence that the title tag possesses, a search-engine penalty is likely to result if the same title tag is repeated across all pages.
Optimize Meta Description Tags
Meta description tags allow you to summarize what a particular Web page’s content is about. Some search engines use the meta description tags in their results pages directly underneath the Web page titles. Your rankings on these search engines are likely influenced by your meta description tags. Writing a brief yet informative description about your Web page’s content and adding it to your meta description tag is a search engine optimization tactic that should not be skipped.
You should optimize each and every meta description tag on your Web site because meta description tags are part of the display information that visitors see when your site is listed in the search engines. The meta description tag contains a brief description of what your Web page is about, and although not as influential as it once was in the search-engine ranking process, the meta description tag is important because you can use it as a method to deliver your marketing message and entice search-engine visitors to click on your listing versus clicking on your competition. The meta description tag is located in the header of an HTML document, and its syntax is as follows:
<HEAD>
<META NAME=”description” CONTENT=”This is a brief description of your Web page.”>
</HEAD>
At one time, the meta description tag could be stuffed with keywords and phrases in an attempt to trick the search engines into believing a Web page was more relevant for those terms than it actually was. Advances in search engine ranking algorithms have reduced the impact the meta description tag has on rankings, but from a human visitor standpoint, it is still very important.
When search engine users find your page in the search-engine results, the text contained within your meta description tag often appears directly underneath the title tag. Create a few compelling sentences describing your product, services, or Web site content, and place them in your meta description tag.
The description should interest the potential visitor and tempt that person to click your search-engine result link. Make sure all your pages have unique meta description tags. You may be tempted to replicate the same tag throughout your entire Web site, but this practice is likely to hurt your rankings; the major search engines could determine that all your pages are duplicates.
Not all search engines use the meta description tag in the results pages. Google, for example, generates its own description based on the content contained within the particular Web page. Whether Google uses meta description tags in its ranking algorithms is not known. Still, you should take advantage of the search-engine spiders that do use the meta description tag in their ranking algorithms.
Less-popular but still-significant search engines such as Ask.com, AltaVista, AllTheWeb, and Teoma still do use the meta description tag in their results. Try the free meta tag generator from SeoBook.com at http://tools.seobook.com/meta-medic. Simply enter your preferred page title, a description of the page, and a list of relevant keywords, and this tool generates a complete set of meta tags for you to copy and paste onto your Web page.
Optimize Meta Keyword Tags
Meta keyword tags allow you to indicate the relevance of a particular Web page to certain keywords and phrases. Although many search engines ignore this tag, some likely still use it in their ranking algorithms. For that reason alone, you want to implement this tag on all your Web pages. The keywords and phrases contained in your meta keywords tag work in tandem with the meta description tag to describe the content of a particular Web page.
Perhaps the least important factor in optimizing a Web site for search-engine rankings is the use of the meta keyword tag. Similar to the meta description tag, the meta keyword tag contains a list of keywords or phrases, separated by commas, that describe the subject matter of a particular Web page. Today, the search engines give little consideration to meta keyword tags. Still, you should not skip implementing this tag on all your Web pages.
What sort of significance the search engines may place on this tag in the future is impossible to know, and although you are not likely to see an increase in your rankings with today’s ranking algorithms, anything is possible down the road. In the mid-1990s, back when search engines were much less sophisticated and had much less computing power, the meta keyword tag was used by the search engines to determine what keywords and phrases a Web page should rank for.
As you can imagine, it did not take long before the meta keyword tag was exploited to obtain search engine rankings for keywords and phrases that had nothing to do with the actual content of certain pages. The meta keyword tag is located in the header of an HTML document, and its syntax is as follows:
<HEAD>
<META NAME=”keywords” CONTENT=”a, list, of,
keywords, describing, your, web, page,
separated, by, commas”>
</HEAD>
For each page on your Web site, generate a short list of no more than ten keywords or phrases and include them in the meta keyword tag. Do not repeat keywords or phrases, and be sure that each Web page on your site has a unique meta keyword tag. Again, although you may be tempted to duplicate this tag throughout your site, your rankings could decrease as a result due to duplicate content.
An invaluable tool to help analyze meta tags at http://www.seocentro.com/tools/search-engines/metatag-analyzer.html. The tool analyzes every meta tag of a Web page and offers suggestions to improve those tags. It analyzes the length and relevancy of your title, description, and keywords meta tags. It also verifies that all the tags, including the robots tag discussed in the next task, are formatted correctly. Incorrectly formatted tags can render your HTML unreadable by the search engines, causing a ranking penalty, and they could prevent a Web browser from loading your page correctly, thus rendering it unreadable to human visitors as well.
Try to make sure your meta tags follow the guidelines and suggestions mentioned by the tool. Keep your title, description, and keywords meta tags within the length requirements. The tool can also be used to analyze your competitors’ meta tags if you are curious to see what they have done differently. The tool also analyzes the size and load time of the page. Pages that are too large or take too long to load can aggravate your visitors and push them out the door.
