SEO Tips and Tricks - Sort Out Your Meta Tags

Although meta tags do not have the weight they once did due to years of abuse by spammers using 'keyword-stuffing' tactics, it still pays to get them right.

The main use of meta tags nowadays is to influence how your web pages are described, when part of a search engine's results.

It's quite straightforward to add them in and a page with them included still holds more weight than one without.

All meta tags should be placed in the HEAD section of the page.

As an example, let's take my website as an example.

The Head section of my page should have the following attributes looks something like this

Meta Name="Description" Content="Your content here"

This should ideally be a on-liner summing up the content of your website. Keep it to a snappy sentence, whilst at the same time sprinkling some long-tail keywords into the mix (multiple word phrases).

Meta Name="Keywords" Content="Your keywords here"

Try not to use too many keywords Google et al frown on this practice and view it as 'keyword stuffing'. Try to keep them to less than 70 characters if you can. Also silly as it sounds, for keywords don't use keywords, but 'keyphrases'. No-one's going to find you if you have 'car' as your phrase, but put 'red ford cortina car' and they more likely will. Get the picture?

And unless you're one of the Apples or Microsoft's of this world, don't waste precious real estate by entering your web address; focus on the message you want to get across to users. Your web address will be part of the search results anyway.

Putting these in order of importance, it would be Title, Description and, a long way last, the keywords.

You'll be surprised how many sites don't have even a title on their web pages, with 'Untitled' appearing across the top. A wasted opportunity.

You can get some good ideas as to which keywords (phrases!) and descriptions to use for your page by employing Google's Keyword Tool.

After typing in a key word or phrase here, Google will offer you alternative suggestions, together with the number of monthly searches for this phrase and how much competition you are up against for that term.

Remember to keep your keywords niche, whilst also making sure there are enough monthly searches to justify their use.

Other things to consider

When inserting images, ALWAYS use Alt Tags. Many people forget to do this at their peril. Google and all other search engines really do take notice of these, and again, keep them relevant and pertinent. Search engines use these alt tags to make sense of your page, since they can't interpret the images alone. When choosing your keywords, understand your audience and the message you want to get across. Try to use different keywords on each page instead of simply copying It all adds to Google liking that little bit more and again helps them build a picture and better understand what your site is all about. Keep refining all the time. You might find that one little tweak will suddenly shoot you up in the rankings. Use Google Analytics to see which search terms are working and which aren't.   Keep adding content - the more the better. This will be a running theme on this site, along with BE PATIENT! It can be very frustrating seeing your lovingly put together site floundering down in the doldrums, particularly if it's a relatively new Domain name. It can take between 6 months and a year before the search engines start to trust your site and start placing you higher in their rankings.

In the meantime, keep plugging away with good quality content and lots of it - and, I promise, it will happen for you!

You'll wake up one day on page one of Google and all that hard work you've put in will have been worth it!

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