Meta Tags, Titles & Their Uses

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.

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!