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.
3 Key Meta Tags (aka Meta Data)
There are actually four critical elements in the <head> section of your Web page. If you optimize metadata for the three 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
- 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 155 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.
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 your website should have a unique Page Title. This keeps visitors from becoming confused, and helps avoid having search engines filter out your pages as duplicate content.
The first 8-10 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 63 characters of the title will be shown in the blue, click-able 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.
Photo credit: digitalart
