SEO - Meta Tags

When construction of your website is nearing completion, it's important to move onto the next step, that's adding the meta-tags.

Keywords

The meta keywords tag allows you to provide additional text for crawler-based search engines to index along with your body copy. How does this help you? Well, for most major crawlers, it doesn't. That's because most crawlers now ignore the tag.

The meta keywords tag is sometimes useful as a way to reinforce the terms you think a page is important for. For instance, if you had a page about stamp collecting -- AND you say the words stamp collecting at various places in your body copy -- then mentioning the words "stamp collecting" in the meta keywords tag MIGHT help boost your page a bit higher for those words.

It's probably a good idea to include keywords in the site. Start preparation of a list of words, you can type into a draft email message if you like, or make up a word text file to email as an attachment, typing like this: word, comma, space, word, comma, space, etc. (no returns). Please also include phrases, keeping in mind that what we're aiming at achieving is word matches with the line of text that a user might put into the search field of a search engine. Include all the obvious words, but we'd like to match with associated search enquiries also. For example, if you own a B&B establishment, you might consider adding words like chalets, retreats, resorts. Don't forget to include regional names, like geographe bay, dunsborough, margaret river, etc. You should also include any commonly misspelt words so that you can make a word match with those also. Remember that not everyone searching even knows you exist and you might pick up enquiries from people browsing in associated categories.

Title

An important tag is the <title>. This will appear in the reverse bar of a visitor's browser when they view the web page. For eg. within the title tag of this page that you are reading is this text: Planet Graphics | Website Design & Graphic Design Busselton | SEO - Meta Tags. The title tag is also used as the words to describe your page when someone adds it to their 'favourites' or 'bookmarks'.

The title tag is crucial for search engines. The text you use in this tag is one of the most important factors in how a search engine may decide to rank your website. In addition, all major crawlers will use the text of your title tag for the title of your page in their listings. Think about the key terms you'd like your website to be found under, then incorporate those terms into your title in a short descriptive fashion. That text will be used as your title in crawler-based search engines, as well as the title in bookmarks and in browser reverse bars.

Description

The meta description tag allows you to influence the description of your page in the search engine listings. This description is displayed under the 'title' in the results list. Not every search engine uses the description tag entirely and instead may automatically generate its own description. Some of the description displayed in the results list may be sourced from the body copy of the page itself. An easy way to create your description is to take the first sentence or two of body copy from your webpage and use that for the meta description content.

Conclusion

There are other meta tags that we may employ if the site design & construction is such that additional tags might help performance in the listing. Remember that not all search engines utilise meta tag information in the same way, or at all, but we recommend using at least the three tags listed above.

Disclaimer: Planet Graphics website services do not include post construction marketing or submission of your website URL to search engines. We do not make any claims with regards to expectations of results of any kind post publishing of your website. All advices given are general suggestions and should be used as a guide only. You should make up your own mind as to its relevance to your business. You should consult a lawyer if you would like to know about your legal responsibilities and obligations with respect to the content of your website.