We’ve all heard the expression “The money’s in the bag” but I think that in the world of Search Engine Optimization, it’s fair to change this to something a little more appropriate.
I am still learning how to optimise my sites, using wordpress to do all the hardwork for me in most instances, and it made me realise that this automation is taking something away from me… UNDERSTANDING! Don’t get me wrong, wordpress is amazing, and the automation is a fantastic feature that enables me to focus on more important aspects of my business, but it’s still good to have a basic understanding of how SEO works within your site and how TAGS can help promote your site to the engines.
I emphasize throughout this blog the importance of understanding what you are doing before implementing it, and this post is just another attempt for me (and indirectly you guys) to try and figure out EXACTLY what the various tags within your HTML code actually do.
Meta Tags
Meta tags have never been a guaranteed way to gain a top ranking on search engines. The most valuable feature they offer the owner of the site is the ability to control to some degree how their web pages are described by the search engines.
What are meta tags? They are information inserted into the “head” area of your web pages. Other than the title tag (see below), information in the head area of your web pages is not seen by those viewing your pages in browsers. Instead, meta tags are used to communicate information that a visitor may not be concerned with. Meta tags, for example, can tell a browser what “character set” to use or whether a web page has a restricted rating.
Let’s see two common types of meta tags, then we’ll discuss exactly how they are used:
In the example above, you can see the beginning of the page’s “head” area as noted by the <HEAD> tag — it ends at the portion shown as </HEAD>.
Meta tags go in between the “opening” and “closing” HEAD tags. Shown in the example is a TITLE tag, then a META DESCRIPTION tag, then a META KEYWORDS tag.
The Title Tag
The HTML title tag: Whatever text you place in the title tag (between the <TITLE> and </TITLE> portions as shown in the example) will appear in the top bar of someone’s browser when they view the web page. For example, as you can see in the attached image, I have typed in www.simplifyingyourwebbusiness.com but can you see what the owner (that’s me – yes a shameless plug) has typed into the TITLE field within the HTML Head tag.
The title tag is also used as the words to describe your page when someone adds it to their “Favorites” or “Bookmarks” lists. In addition, all major search engines will use the text of your title tag as the text they use for the title of your page in your listings. (and again, because I find pictures so much easier to learn from…)
Looking at this image brings me to the next point of study: How do we specify what text appears under the hyper text ‘title tag’?
The Meta Description Tag
The meta description tag allows you to influence the description of your page in the search engines that support the tag (eg: Teoma supports it, Google and Yahoo only semi supports this – see attached video)
Now to put this into simplified terms as I try to do with every thing I post, let’s look at the ‘stamp collecting’ META tag example above. See the one that says “name=description”? That’s the meta description tag. The text you want to be shown as your description goes between the quotation marks after the “content=” portion of the tag (generally, 200 to 250 characters may be indexed, though only a smaller portion of this amount may be displayed). so if we stick with this example, we can see that if the site appears in the SERPS under the specified keyword, the entry will have the line “Stamp Collecting World” as the hypertext link and the description underneath would say “Everything you wanted to know about stamps, from prices to history” Of course this is a very rough guide as to how the Crawler type search engines would display your results when using the TAGS correctly. Generally crawler based search engines like Google and Yahoo may change this slightly as they have their own algorithms, but as a rule: Google would have the text above and then it may add some more text that pertain directly to the original search keyphrase used.
so to summarize; it is worthwhile using the meta description tag for your pages, because it gives you some degree of control with various search engines. An easy way to do this often is to take the first sentence or two of body copy from your web page and use that for the meta description content.
The Meta Keywords Tag
The meta keywords tag allows you to provide additional text for crawler-based search engines to index along with your body copy. But this does not help you! And that’s because most crawlers now ignore the tag.
The meta keywords tag is sometimes useful as a way to reinforce the terms you think a page is important for (on the dying few search engines that still use it). For example, let’s go back to our stamp collecting site. So the site is all about stamp collecting — and you say the words stamp collecting at various places in your body copy — so mentioning the words “stamp collecting” in the meta keywords tag MIGHT help boost your page a bit higher for those words.
Remember, if you don’t use the words “stamp collecting” on the page at all, then just adding them to the meta keywords tag is extremely unlikely to help the page do well for the keyword – keyphrase – term. The text in the meta keywords tag works in conjunction with the text in your body copy.
The meta keyword tag is also sometimes useful as a way to help your page come up for synonyms or unusual words that don’t appear on the page itself. For instance, let’s say you had a page all about the “Penny Black” stamp. You never actually say the word “collecting” on this page. By having the word in your meta keywords tag, then you may help increase the odds of coming up if someone searched for “penny black stamp collecting.” Of course you would have a greater chance if you just used the word “collecting” in the body copy of the page itself.
Meta Tags Summary:
Far too many people new to search engine optimization obsess over the meta keywords tag. FEW crawlers support it. For those that do, it MIGHT, POSSIBLY, BUT WITH NO GUARANTEE! help improve the ranking of your page. It also may very well do nothing for your page at all. In fact, repeat a particular word too often in a meta keywords tag and you could actually harm your page’s chances of ranking well. Because of this, I strongly suggest that those new to search engine optimization not even worry about the tag at all.
Still want to use the meta keywords tag? We shall go back to our stamp collecting example above. See the second meta tag shown, the one that says “name=keywords”? That’s the meta keywords tag. The keywords you want associated with your page go between the quotation marks after the “content=” portion of the tag, so in the case above, the site owner has decided he/she wants to rank for ‘stamps’, ‘stamp collecting’, ‘prices’, stamp history’, and ‘stamps for sale’
OK that’s all I can think of for now, I mean I can digress into a THOUSAND sub categories, but the idea here is to SIMPLIFY things, not over complicate them. Please feel free to comment and or post some relevant links or refute my claims even!
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I’m spoiled. My WYSIWYG editor does all that for me.
Scott Barron´s last blog ..A Little Housekeeping Online
Twitter: bloggersmarket
August 20, 2010 at 11:09 PM
Hi Alex,
I’ve gotten caught up in the Plug-In “We will take care of everything for you” craze. If you have a problem there is a plug-in to deal with it, removing “UNDERSTANDING” from the Blogger. While I’ll admit most of these plug-ins facilitate speed, sometimes I wonder whether they do more harm than good. The real problem as I see it, is when you are on the fly or have to improvise, you have no idea what you are doing. From writing extreme PHP right down to the most basic HTML, everything is now done for you. Just Great!
!—->
Jeffrey Morgan´s last blog ..Matching Clothes For Your Blog
Twitter: bloggersmarket
August 20, 2010 at 11:11 PM
Oh well, my code didn’t show up, maybe I really am clueless!
Jeffrey Morgan´s last blog ..Matching Clothes For Your Blog