Step 1 - Optimize Your Meta Tags

Why optimize my meta tags?

Your HTML page title and meta description tag serve as the first impression your site makes on a prospective customer in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).  Here's a snapshot of our home page indexed in Google.

Meta tags give you the opportunity to better position and describe your landing pages in the search engines; however, even perfectly constructed meta tags are not sufficient by themselves to rank highly.   More...

  What are meta tags?

Meta tags consist of info inserted into the "HEAD" section of your web pages.     Meta tags fall under the rubric of meta elements (HTML or XHTML), and there's a lot of details about meta stuff that you need not worry about.   For SEO purposes, we'll concern ourselves with only meta tags specifying a page description and a list of keywords.   These are called the meta description tag and meta keywords tag, respectively. 

Of these two types, the meta description tag is definitely more important.   The meta keywords tag, once widely used by search engines, is now less significant because it's the easiest to spam and manipulate.  Actually, only a couple of major crawler-based search engines even support the meta keywords tag (more on this in a bit).  More...

What meta tags look like

Meta tags tell search engine spiders about your page's content.  

-  Notice how meta tags are placed within the "HEAD" section of your HTML file.  - 

-  Of the source code above, only the TITLE is visible on your page.  -


 

 Tips for optimizing your meta description tags

• Your primary goal is to differentiate your site from the competition in the search results

• Your secondary goal is to draw in visitors and attract more clicks with these unique descriptions

• Keep the tag pithy and within the following character limit:  More...

  Snippets

Unfortunately, you cannot entirely control where or when your meta description tags will appear in some search engines.  You’ll notice that for some pages indexed you'll see what's called a snippet. 

Here's an example of a snippet which resulted by searching Google for video camera hardware.  Observe how the 'description' starts in the middle of a sentence and may or may not convey a complete idea:

This occurs when a search engine crawler bypasses your meta description tag and instead, shows a brief stretch or stretches of content taken from that particular landing page.  You have a few options if you don't like the snippet currently showing for one of your listings. More... 

 Don't distress over your meta keywords tags

Way too many SEO newcomers get distressed and aren't efficient at all when doing their meta keywords tags.   From our recent research and testing, only Yahoo! and Ask are the major crawler-based search engines that even support the meta keywords tag.  

Google and Live no longer support it likely due to the fact that it's been badly abused and spammed so much in the past.  Plus, imagine if all you had to do to get top positioning was insert keywords into this tag...yeah right!  More...

Match Front- to Back-end SEO

It's easy to get lost in the details of meta tags and all of this technical stuff.   So, we've created a fictitious business called "Flash Discount Textbooks," and we're going to optimize a landing page to show you how to match your front to back-end SEO.  

Unlock the full version of Step 1:  Optimize Your Meta Tags and see how we tie everything together - from page titles & meta tags to the content visible to users.