Putting Some Meat Into Your
Meta Tags

In the 1990s search engines were reliant on meta tag data to correctly classify a web page. The practice dated to the days when the Internet was at heart still an academic resource. However, webmasters for commercial sites quickly learned that if they used a lot of the right keywords in their meta tags they would be more likely to gain a high ranking in the search engines - and more importantly, traffic to the web site.

Search engines have, on the whole, got wise to this trick now, and look at a range of factors when appraising a site, which may or may not include the meta tags of a site. While meta tags are usually present on the pages of a well-optimised site, in reality they have been vastly deprecated by the search engines. If you just fill your meta tags with the keywords then your site will experience no change in the search engines rankings. You’re going to have to look at all parts of my SEO guide and implement a combination of the more important ones on your site if you want to achieve good listings and good traffic.

Despite this, it is still useful to research and write meta tags for your site. Search engines may still use the description field on the search engine results page, and on uncompetitive terms the meta tags could provide your site with just the push they need.

There are several meta tag fields available to you; of which only two have any real value. These are the meta keyword field and the meta description field. Like the Title tag we looked at in Part 3, these meta tags live in the header of your page.

Meta Keywords

Your meta keyword field will look a little something like the example I have created below. This might be for the apple page of a site selling fruit:

<META NAME="keywords" content="apple, red apple, Braeburn, russet, cider apple, aple, apples, etc.">

Notice that keywords also includes key phrases of more than one word. Although the temptation might be to put every relevant keyword and phrase in your keywords tag, the length of the tag should not exceed 1000 characters (including spaces).
Although you can put additional keywords into your keyword meta tag that do not appear in the copy, these will probably not be strong enough to make an impact on their own. The keywords tag works better as a reinforcement of keywords already present on your page. Also remember to include plurals and mis-spellings if you think there is the volume of searches to justify these. Above I have included a common mis-spelling for ‘apple’ as well as the plural form ‘apples’. However, the tricky part of all this is avoiding too much duplication. In the example above I have used the keyword ‘apple’ four times in different phrases; if I use ‘apple’ more than 6 or 7 times I might trigger keyword stuffing filters and my site will gain no advantage. This rule is harder to avoid for some businesses than others.
Finally, if there is important geographical data relating to your business, then include it in the meta tag.

Meta Descriptions

Your meta description field will look a little something like the example I have created below. Again, this is for the apple page of the same site as I used earlier:

<META NAME="description" content="Fruity Apple Farms apples are great for cider making. We also sell Braeburn apples, russet apples and a range of other fruit.">

The length of this tag should not exceed 250 characters (including spaces). 

You need to include your core (sorry!) keyword phrases in this text in particular those which have already appeared elsewhere in the site copy. You have to accurately describe what is on your page while making it appealing to readers. Also, putting your most important keywords at the beginning of your description is highly recommended; particularly if you have exceeded the 250-character limit, after which we cannot guarantee search engines will index the keywords.

We’re well into the second half of the guide now, but there’s still plenty of meat to come in the next three issues. Next month we’ll be looking at the often-underrated ALT tag attribute; which is a great way of further reinforcing the key phrases on your site.

Remember, you need to take every chance you get to display the keywords appropriate to your site.