Meta Tags

You may have heard the term Meta Tags in relation to adding keywords to your website. I would like to go over a few of the more important tags here.

Title Tag:
This is by far the most important tag on the page and it determines what you see in the title bar of the browser window (very top left). The Title Tag should be about 40 – 60 characters long and contain your most important keywords, that is, the words you think people are most likely to type in to find your site in the search engines. No need to write your life story here and no need to be eloquent or include words like the, and, or, etc..or even use punctuation – just your keywords. When you do a search on google and see the list of results, the actual link you click on to take you to a website more often than not shows content from the Title Tag so thats how important it is. If you have no info in your title tag then google would look in the tags below.

Description Meta Tag:
This tag allows for a more literate description of your website but still try to include all your keywords as it may appear in a list of google results. The Description tag should go immediately below the Title Tag.

Keywords Meta Tag:
This is the tag that most people get exited about but in reality its not really noticed by google anymore – we think! It might come in handy if you havn’t bothered with any of the tags above and don’t have any content on your home page – an unlikely scenario! To include it, simply write in about 10 – 12 keywords separated by commas, some of which you may already have included in the tags above.

And Finally..!
There are no other Meta Tags that really matter to the search engines despite the fact that people put them in constantly. The only other thing you need do, especially on the home page is to just write your page content with with lots of keywords included and using Bold text, Heading text, Bulleted lists and Text links. Give any images you insert an Alt tag or image description as this will allow your images and content to be found in google also. Remember to include <noscript> tags with descriptions around embedded content like Flash animations, Video files, Sound files and iframes also.

If you need any help implementing any of the above optimization techniques use the Contact Page on this Blog.

Leon