Often overlooked, meta tags are vital to the success of your website as they help search engines index your website – and therefore enable customers to find and use your business.
If you are tight on time and budget, Meta Tags are the single most important piece of search engine marketing you can do for your business. Without them, your pages could show as "untitled document" on search engine results. But written well, they could boost page rankings and the number of clicks you get.
And with Google's new predictive search boxes - where Google offers keyphrase suggestions and changes the search results as you type - meta tags are more important than ever as users decide in a split second which listing to click on.
Each page on your website should have a Meta Title and a Meta Description. Do yours? A quick and easy way to find out or recap is to type in site:yourdomainname (no spaces, no www before your domain name) into the Google search box and click Google Search.
Now read and review the results – see image below. Meta Titles are shown on the the first line of the results, underlined in blue. The Meta Description follows underneath. Look at the title and description for each page of your website. Is the information up to date and appropriate? Don’t have any? Now is the time to get writing. Do not leave them blank.
If you are tight on time and budget, Meta Tags are the single most important piece of search engine marketing you can do for your business. Without them, your pages could show as "untitled document" on search engine results. But written well, they could boost page rankings and the number of clicks you get.
And with Google's new predictive search boxes - where Google offers keyphrase suggestions and changes the search results as you type - meta tags are more important than ever as users decide in a split second which listing to click on.
Step 1
Each page on your website should have a Meta Title and a Meta Description. Do yours? A quick and easy way to find out or recap is to type in site:yourdomainname (no spaces, no www before your domain name) into the Google search box and click Google Search.
Now read and review the results – see image below. Meta Titles are shown on the the first line of the results, underlined in blue. The Meta Description follows underneath. Look at the title and description for each page of your website. Is the information up to date and appropriate? Don’t have any? Now is the time to get writing. Do not leave them blank.
Meta titles and descriptions in Google search results
Step 2
The meta title is also seen in the browser’s title bar and is the first thing potential customers will see if they click on a page. So keep it relevant and current and rewrite if necessary.
Remember:
• The title should reflect the content of that page (not the website).
• It should contain the keyword/phrase you want the page to rank for.
• Keep titles to 65 characters or less. Write more and titles will simply be cut-off mid-sentence by Google and other search engines.
Step 3:
The meta description should be 155 characters or less and should be written in an engaging way to persuade visitors to click through to your page.
Step 4:
Happy with the words? The title and description now need to be pasted into the HTML source code of the section of your website pages or in the appropriate place within your website’s content management system. You may be able to do this yourself, or, depending on your website’s design, seek technical help from your website company to insert the meta tags for you.
