How to Optimize Metadata to Leverage Your On-page SEO
by
Nicolette Beard
The Internet is a frontier where anything is possible with the right
tactics. Often, just addressing the basics will lead to more targeted
traffic, the possibility of dominating your competition on the Web and
passionate users who embrace your brand.
The first step to online success is getting the basics right.
4 Key Meta Tags (aka Meta Data)
There are actually five critical elements in the <head> section of your
Web page. If you optimize metadata for the four primary meta tags as well
as your Page Title, you will have done more than your competition in
optimizing your pages for search.
When you get these four meta tags right
- Description Meta Tag
- Keywords Meta Tag
- Robots Meta Tag
- Refresh Meta Tag
and craft a keyword-rich Page Title, you
will gain more targeted traffic and see your rankings rise, especially if
you're in a niche market.
Description Meta Tag: The META
description tag is not seen in the browser at all, but in many cases Google
will display it underneath your page's title in search results. (Actually,
they display up to around 160 characters.) This means that you have control
(most of the time) over what is being displayed.
If the description
meta tag is empty, search robots will scan the page for relevant text and
grab a snippet of that content. This could be good or bad depending on the
action you want visitors to take.
Worse is having the same page
descriptions, which are viewed as "duplicate content" and those pages are
filtered out from the Main Index. Not good!
Just as you would when
writing pay-per-click ads, you want to look at the combination of title and
description to make sure that they work well together. Little secret: have
you ever seen a company's toll-free number on the search results page?
That's probably because they've included it in their META description tag.
Keyword Meta Tag: The META keywords tag is pretty much ignored by
Google, but Yahoo! and Bing still use it as a ranking signal (as do lesser
known search engines and meta crawlers). Just don't go crazy with it.
Focus on misspellings, alternative spellings, acronyms and major search
terms for the page. Six unique keywords for every page should suffice.
Robots Meta Tag: The META robots tag is often misunderstood. The
only reason to use this tag is if you don't want a page to be indexed, and
can't make that happen with a robots.txt file.
The only meaningful
contents of this tag are noindex (don't index the page) and nofollow (don't
follow links). Saying "index,follow" will not influence a search engine
spider at all, because indexing pages and following links is what they do by
default.
Read more on the proper use of robots.txt vs. robots meta tag.
Refresh Meta Tag: The META refresh tag is something you should be
careful of using on any page that the search engines will index, as it is
often used in deceptive redirects. I sometimes use a META refresh on custom
404 error pages, to redirect the visitor to the home page or a site map
page, but there is no risk here, since any page that returns a 404 Not Found
error to the spider will not get indexed anyway.
Saving the Best On-Page SEO Tactic for Last
Page Title Element: The contents of the Page Title are displayed
as the window title in most Web browsers, at the very top of the screen. For
SEO and usability purposes, every page on the Web site should have a unique
Page Title. This keeps visitors from becoming confused, and helps avoid
having your pages filtered out as duplicate content by the search engines.
The first 10-12 words in the title will be indexed by search engines,
and influence the search engine rankings of a page. What does this mean for
SEO? Use your most important keywords in the page title, including your
company name for branding purposes.
Many people conduct what's called
"navigational search." They know the company name, so they type it into a
search box rather than typing in the URL in a browser. I wonder how many
companies are missing out on traffic because they fail to place their name
in the Page Title?
One more reason to put keywords first: only the
first 65 characters of the title will be shown in the blue, clickable link
when your page appears in search results. Because links containing keywords
most likely meet the information needs of the searcher, that link is more
likely to be clicked.
Put your best foot forward and your most
important keywords first.
