Title and Meta Tags can be quite helpful—and effective—to

gaining more visitors to your site. However, they are only as

effective as you make them. Proper use of meta and title tags is

absolutely essential to making them a good thing for your site.

In this newsletter, we will go over the basics of title & meta

tags—using proper keywords, writing good meta tag descriptions,

and using the title tag effectively.

 

The basics to creating good meta tags

 

It is best to plot out how you’ll use meta tags on a particular

page before even writing the content for the page. Lots of

people will write the content of the page and then try to

sprinkle in keywords in the meta tags. This is an ineffective

way of doing things, as it usually makes your page confusing to

visitors.

 

Before writing content, take a minute to pick out 3-4 primary

keywords. Then take another minute to write phrases from those

words. Once you’ve done that, you can begin writing your content

around the keywords.

 

How do I select proper keywords to enter into the meta tags?

 

This is an excellent question. Really, there are two main rules

of thumb for selecting proper keywords.

 

#1: Base your keywords off of the content of your site.

 

For instance, if you are running a digital photography site,

your keywords could be digital, photographs, photography etc.

You’ll want to steer clear of silly keywords that don’t relate

to your site. These would include keywords completely irrelevant

to your site.

 

#2: Make sure your keywords can flow naturally throughout the

content of your site.

 

Try to pick words that you can easily incorporate into the

content of your site and that make sense. You must remember that

actual people are reading your site—the content(and keywords)

MUST make sense to not only search engines, but also to the

people who visit your site. Thus, the keywords you choose must

fit the content of your site perfectly.

 

How do I write a good description tag?

 

What description tags essentially do is briefly inform the

search bot/web crawler what a site is about. Therefore, to write

a good description tag, you must be able to write a good, brief

description of what your site is about. It is important to note

that you are limited to 200 characters or less in the

description tag so be as concise as possible.

 

Let’s use the photography example again. Your site is based on

digital photography. So your description tag should say that

your site is related to digital photography.

 

Example description tag: “Digital photography site, digital

photos, buy digital photos, print digital photos”.

 

The search engine bot/web crawler will see this and will place

the site in relevant search results. So if someone searches for

digital photos, they should see your site somewhere on the list.

 

The same principle can be applied to any and every site. Good

description tags are as simple as a good, concise description of

what your site is about.

 

How to use the Title tag Effectively.

 

There are some misconceptions about Title tags. People have said

in the past(and some still do today) that a good, effective

Title tag consists of keywords. However, this is just not true.

Every good title tag consists of two things—the name of the site

and a brief description of what is on the site.

 

One thing to keep in mind is that the Title tag is also the

title of your listing in any search engine. Why would you want

your title listing to consist of keywords? It won’t help your

site at all—it will actually hurt it because people are less

likely to take the site seriously due to silly keywords. Another

thing worth noting is that the Title tag should never be more

than 80 characters. Generally speaking, the briefer the Title

tag is, the better. So strive to be concise!

 

So what is a good, effective Title tag? Well, a good, effective

Title tag should first have the name of your web site (so if

it’s www.digitalphotography.com, it should be “Digital

Photography”) and then a short description of the site. In this

example, you could put “Digital Photography – Buy and Print

Digital Photos Here”. This is both an accurate and effective

Title tag for this particular site. Apply this principle to your

site and you will have a good and effective Title tag.

 

To your success,

Murray

 

P.S. Meta tags and titles are incredibly useful to your site.

Master the above techniques and you will be able to create

effective meta tags and titles that will help your site earn a

higher search engine ranking and more visitors!