Meta Tags - Building and Optimizing a Search Engine Friendly Pages - Part 1

Oct 17th, 2007 | By seojr | Category: SEO Optimization

Today I wanted to start a series of articles on best SEO techniques when building a Search Engine Friendly web page and/or optimizing it for best Results in Search Engines (SERP).

In this first article we’ll discuss proper use and optimization of Meta Tags and using keywords and phrases in Meta Tags.

Meta Tag Quick Overview

What are meta tags?

They are information inserted into the “head” area of your web pages. Other than the title tag (explained below), information in the head area of your web pages is used to communicate information that is not intended for human visitor and is not seen by humans but only crawlers. Meta tags, for example, can tell a browser what “character set” to use or whether a web page has self-rated itself in terms of adult content as well as telling search engine spider what this page is about and more.

Here’s most common and basic meta tag:
<HEAD> <title>Free Articles Directory - Free Content</title> <meta name=”keywords” content=”free content, free web content, free articles directory, article directory” /> <meta name=”description” content=”Free online articles directory. Search and find Free Content for your website, eZine or newsletters.” /> </HEAD>

For this example we have used Meta Information from Free Articles Directory

Meta tags go in between the “opening” and “closing” HEAD tags. Shown in the example above is a TITLE tag, then a META DESCRIPTION tag, then a META KEYWORDS tag.

Title Tag Element

No matter what, the page title tag element is still one of the most important factors for ranking highly in the search engines.

The title tag is displayed as the first line of text in the blue row at the top of the browsing window. Search Engine Friendly title tag is ideally 3-9 words (60-80 characters) maximum in length, straight and to the point, no fluff BS here because this is what will show up in search engine results as a link back to your page. You want to have at least one main keyword in this tag but don’t stuff all of your keywords and search phrases in one headline or in one title tag. Instead organize your website into different pages and make a separate title tag for each of your pages.

Just make sure your Page Title Tag Element is relevant to the content on the page, it is very important for good SERP’s.

Quick References:

Description Meta Tag (Metadata)

The perfect META description tag consists of 25 to 30 words or less but using no more than 160 to 180 characters total (including spaces) or some Search Engines would not consider it Search Engine Friendly.

Almost all Search Engines (including Google, Yahoo and MSN) sometimes show the page description that you used in your Description Meta Tag in their Search Results as a summary of your site. Even though Google mostly ignores the meta description tag and instead will automatically generate its own description for this page from your page’s content.

Again for best results make sure your META Description Tag is relevant to the content on the page.

Quick References:

Keywords META Tag (Metadata)

META keywords tag will provide additional text for crawler-based search engines to index along with your content. It used to be one of the most important areas after the page title and page description but unfortunately it has been abused that there is very little weight given to the META keywords tag today. Still it doesn’t hurt to have this tag as well as a way to reinforce the keyword terms you think your page is themed for.

For example, if you had a page about “online dating”, and you have the word “online dating” at various places in your body content, then mentioning the words “online dating” in the meta keywords tag just MIGHT help boost your page a bit higher for those words. Just note that if you don’t use certain words on the page at all, then adding them to the keywords meta tag will be useless.

The meta keyword tag is also sometimes useful as a way to help your page come up for synonyms or unusual words that don’t appear on the page itself but don’t fret too much over your Keywords Meta tag, instead utilize keywords and keyword phrases from your Title Tag element, Description Meta Tag, heading tag (which we’ll discuss in the next article) and first one or two paragraphs of visible content. Optimal Keyword Meta Tag has 15 to 20 words max.

Again make sure your META Keywords Tag is relevant to the content on your page.

Quick References:

Meta Robots Tag

One other meta tag worth mentioning is the robots tag. This lets you specify that a particular page should NOT be indexed by a search engine. To keep spiders out, simply add this text between your head tags on each page you don’t want indexed ( under Title, Description and Keywords Meta Tags).

<HEAD> <title>Free Articles Directory - Free Content</title> <meta name=”robots” content=”NOINDEX” /> </HEAD>

A normal robots tag that tells crawler to follow all links and index all pages is this:

<HEAD> <title>Free Articles Directory - Free Content</title> <meta name=”robots” content=”index,follow” /> </HEAD>

Other Meta Tags

There are many other meta tags that exist beyond those explored in this first article. One that I like to use for my Article Directory is:

<meta name=”revisit-after” content=”7 days” />

Because it is a Article Directory and every week there new articles added, this tag will tell spider to re-crawl the site every 7 days for new fresh content. So If you upload new pages or post new articles every week, this tag will help your site get spidered more often.

There are “Dublin Core” meta tags. The intent is that these can be used for both “internal” search engines and web-wide ones. However, no major web-wide search engine supports these tags. More about them can be found below:

Dublin Core Metadata Initiative
Dublin Core - Tagging the Web for better search and retrieval
WebReference.com, Nov. 5, 2000

Stayed tuned for the next article that will cover Heading Tags, Alt text attribute, Visible Content and more.

Any comments or suggestions are welcome!

Enjoy.

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Basic SEO Tips Everyone Should Know - SEOjr.com August 4th, 2008 2:38 am :
[...] first thing you should take care of is the title tag of your website. This is probably the most important thing you have to consider carefully. In most [...]
Search Engine Optimization(SEO) - Back to Basics - SEOjr.com September 22nd, 2008 8:18 am :
[...] a domain name that “says it all” about your business is really the first step 2. Meta tags. While not the answer to your prayers, they are vital to good search engine rankings 3. Keyword [...]
Website Title - Most Important SEO | SEO Tips Mashup October 1st, 2008 6:23 pm :
[...] The title is what attracts people to your website and tells them exactly what you have. It needs to also be a good title that will rank high in the search engines, this way your website will pop up more often than others when searched. You need to take time and consider the title in all its entirety. You want to be sure the title tells your prospective clients, exactly what you can offer them while at the same time making it Web friendly for the search engines. [...]

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