SEO Article Series - Meta Tags
These SEO articles are excerpted from an SEO article series on creating search engine optimized meta tags. This is a short summary on SEO meta tags and goes along with Guide to SEO Title Tags, Guide to SEO Meta Description Tags and Guide to SEO Meta Keyword Tags to complete the series.
Titles, Description and Keyword Meta Tags
by Valerie DiCarlo - VDC Enterprises, LLC
A starting guide to basic on-page search engine optimization is creating appropriate Meta tags for each site page.
What Are Meta Tags?
Meta Tags are information inserted into the "head" area of your web pages. Other than the title tag, information in the head area of your web page is not seen by humans viewing your pages in browsers. Meta information is used to communicate information to the search engines that a human visitor may not be concerned with. Meta tags, for example, can tell a browser what "character set" to use or whether a web page has self-rated itself. They mostly communicate to the ‘bots.
It pays to provide title, description, keywords, heading, and alternate tags in the head section of all your indexable pages. All meta tags should be unique and page specific. While meta tags don’t solely impact your organic position, search engines however do use these tags in an assistive manner to theme your page.
Some important points for consideration in developing your meta tags:
- Ideally, the Title, Meta Description, Meta Keyword tags, and page content would align along a consistent and targeted subject that will help the search engines decide what that page is about.
- Each site page can have its own targeted meta tags for individual page optimization.
- In the example below you can see the beginning of the page's "head" area as noted by the HEAD tag -- it ends at the portion shown as </head>. Meta tags go in between the "opening" and "closing" HEAD tags.
Shown in the example is a
TITLE tag, then a META DESCRIPTION tag, then a META KEYWORDS tag.
<head>
<title>Keyword rich page title</title>
<meta name="Description" content="Keyword rich page description">
<meta name="Keywords" content="Targeted keyword list for site page">
</head>
Meta Tagging Summary
The plain truth about the title tags, meta description tags, and meta keyword tags is that they, independent of each other, cannot solely drive positioning. The key to an effective meta tag is pulling them all together in symbiosis - along with page content. When developing your tags, the following must be kept in mind:
- Choose the relevant page specific keywords you want to target for positioning through keyword research and analysis of what terms/phrases people are searching to find your market.
- Create page specific title tags using 1st tier keyword terms with prominence and proximity.
- Create page specific meta description tags to capture the user (marketing message) while using 1st tier and 2nd tier keyword phrases where natural and appropriate.
- Do not use the same meta tags for every site page - use separate, page specific title-description-keyword tags for each site page.
- Write the website page's content based on these keywords.
- Apply these page specific keywords into your meta keyword tags accordingly.
When all of these pieces come together as one, your website meta tags has been properly themed and positioned for basic on-page optimization.
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