Hi I was wondering if you could give a quick overview of meta tags.
I know the main meta tags are the:
1. Title Tag
2. Description
3. Keywords
My question is: are there other meta tags we should be using to increase our SEO, or are these 3 enough? And if there are other meta tags you recommend, could you give a brief explanation of each one and why it is effective and then show how they would look when you add them to the page on the website?
I would love to get some clarity on this because when I check the source code on some websites, I see a lot of different meta tags, and I have no idea if I should be using them or not. So please educate us on which meta tags are useful or necessary to achieve high search engine rankings beyond the title tag, description tag, and keyword tag.
Thanks!
Trevor
Hi Trevor,
Yes it can get quite confusing! I would also recommend watching the webinars, which you can access when you log in at www.searchmarketinglab.com.
The good news is you are right on track -- those are the only tags you need to worry about. Any other tags like telling the spiders when to visit, or what category your website is in, etc. are not useful or necessary.
1. Title Tag
Your title tag is very important and is one of the first things the spiders check to see what your website is about and what keywords you are looking to get ranked for.
You want to start this tag with your number one keyword phrase for that page and if you can also get in a second keyword phrase, that's great. The tag should be under 70 characters -- and it will also appear as your title in the search engine listings, so it should be enticing for someone to click on.
2. Description
Your meta description tag should be like a mini salesletter to get someone to click on your listing in the search engines, as this serves as your site's description.
You should try to start it with your main keyword phrase and then work that in again or use your secondary keyword phrase. A well written description will increase your click throughs. This tag should be around 200 characters.
3. Keywords
This is the least important of the tags and does not help you much. You should just put the main keywords you are optimizing that page for. Do not stuff this tag with keywords or you could get penalized.
This tag is also great to put any common misspellings of your keywords. Try to keep it under 150 characters.
These tags all need to be in your HTML code and in your head tag before the body tag.
Here's what they look like in your website's code:
Title tag: <title>Your Main Keyword Phrase Goes Here</title>
Description tag: <meta name="Description" content="Type Your Enticing Keyword Rich Description Here">
Keywords tag: <meta name="Keywords" content="Your Main Keywords Go Here">
Best regards,
Nicole E
SEO/SEM Expert
