Web Design Springfield MO | SEO Springfield MO

A Meta tag is a label that you give a Web page. These tags are critical because they help Google understand the name of your website’s pages, the information the pages contain, what to display as a description of each web page in the search returns, and how to treat each page when indexed. It is important that each page of your website has its own set of unique Meta tags. In this post, we will be discussing three common Meta tags: title tag, description tag, and the keywords tag.

Title Tag

Your title tag tells Google what your web page is about. This title tag is also displayed on the search results they deliver to their customers. Title tags are really important, so let’s set some ground rules for writing them:

1. Keep them under 60 characters. Anything over 60 characters will be cut off by Google.
2. Try to use less than 7 words. Each word in a title tag is given its own weight. The less words (and more concise), the better.
3. Use your keywords in your title tag. If your keyword strategy is centered around optimizing for the keyword “baseball”, make sure baseball is in your title tag. Preferably twice.

Description Tag

Description tags are used to help Web users understand what each page is about when they use a search engine. I’ve highlighted a description tag in the below image:

The Meta Description is highlighted

Here’s the thing about description tags: Google doesn’t care about them. But your Web users and other search engines such as Yahoo! and Bing do. So make sure each page has a unique meta description tag. A couple of rules about description tags:

1. They should be under 160 characters (anything over 160 characters is cut off by search engines)
2. They should include the portions of your keyword phrases twice if at all possible
3. Write them for humans, not search engines. Be descriptive and let the user know what the page is about.

Keyword Tag

Google stopped paying attention to keyword tags long ago (as they were abused), but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use them. Other search engines do consider them. The keyword tag is simple. You just list the keywords that are relevant to the content you provide, and separate each keyword with a comma.

How To See If Your Website is Utilizing Meta Tags

Now that you have learned what title, description, and keyword tags are, you might be wondering if your website is utilizing them. It’s easy to find out. Simply pull up your Web page, and right click on it. Then select “view page source.” With Firefox, this will display the page source. Here’s what it looks like:

Toward the top, you’ll see my title tag. It looks like this:

<title>Website Design | Internet Marketing | Springfield MO</title>

The image I’ve included does not include the description or keywords tag. But if you’d like, visit my Springfield, MO website design and marketing Home page and right click on it. Then select “view page source.” About halfway down you’ll see the All In One SEO Pack area, which lists my description and keyword tags.

How To Add Meta Tags

If you have WordPress, you are in luck. WordPress makes it easy to do things like adding meta tags. If you use WordPress, just download the All In One SEO Pack plugin. Configuring it is easy. I could go into detail here, but this post is already getting long. Just Google search “how to configure the All In One SEO Pack.”

If you don’t have WordPress and your site isn’t utilizing meta tags, contact your Web developer and ask why not?

Do you have any questions? Ask away in the comments section. I’ll do my best to respond in a timely manner.