Meta Tags

Meta tags are still an important part of your websites appearance to search engines. It is also an integral part of your websites performance. In the past search engines used the meta tag solely to determine what information was on your web page. However, today there are a much more complex set of rules or algorithms that includes keywords and many other factors to determine which result are displayed to the end user.

Search engines use algorithms or programs for indexing your website. These programs are called “bots’ or “spiders” because they constantly crawl the web searching and indexing the millions of web pages and websites and store their findings in search databases for later use. This “indexed data” is accessed when the user of the search engine enters a query into the search bar.

Not all search services use meta tags to determine what is displayed to the person using their service. Some search engines use text slugs from your web page as part of the results, included with, or in lieu of meta tags.

Meta tags give additional information to search services and other programs on the web to assist in the visibility of your web page to these programs and to the user. It is important that you use the most relevant meta tags in relationship to the web page you are assigning them to. In other words, if a person at the Google home page enters a search term about “shoes” the results to that query will be returned as a list, with the page title (a click-able link) the meta tags or description and the web page URL for you to choose from.

As mentioned earlier, it’s important to use the most relevant meta tag to the page you are assigning them to. If your business was selling shoes for example your landing pages first meta tag should be “shoes” However, it may be difficult to compete with large websites that use the keyword “shoes” if that particular website has hundreds or even thousands of pages and links relevant for the keyword “shoes”

If your website included a page for “brown shoes” then your most relevant meta tag for that page should be “brown shoes”

Meta tags should be kept to around 150 characters including spaces and punctuation, use short phrases and the keywords from your web page. It is not necessary to use spaces after the comma. Your meta tags should be entered as such: “shoes,pumps,boots,overshoes”….etc. etc.

Pretend, if you will, that you were searching the Internet for something relevant to your site. Develop a list of search phrases and keywords. These are the keywords you would use in your meta tags as a description of your web page. It’s important to use the most relevant meta tags in order of importance to each page “first” respectively, Each pages “first” meta tags would be unique to that page overall, so choose carefully.

Meta tag “Do’s and Don’ts”

Do use common misspellings of the keywords. Use plural keywords, to be brought into the results for plural and singular keyword searches.

Do use phrases that contain you keywords.

Don’t use keywords more than a couple times, and do not enter words in phrases as individual words, as most search services “bots” may penalize your site for repetition and be perceived as an attempt at “keyword stuffing”

Also, don’t use carriage returns, as some search bots or spiders will determine the carriage return as the end of the meta tag.

Imagine how your site should be displayed and how you want your specific product or service to be found by the search service, if you were searching for it. This will help.

Keep in Mind.

It is very common that 2 or 3 queries are performed by the search engine user, before the results are what the searcher is looking for. For example, a person might enter “shoes” which would return to many results. The next entry may be “brown shoes” and perhaps finally “brown pump shoes” before the searcher starts to click on the website with the actual item they were searching for. This is where the meta tags “relevance” and “order of relevance” is important to your page.

Find out where to use meta tags here.