4-Developers.com
The World of Software Development
Menu:
- Home
- Articles
- Reports
- Technology News
- Events Diary
- Templates
- Forum
- Code Answers
- Developer Software
- Business Software
- Design Software
- Links
- Contact Us
- Privacy Policy
- Site Map
Article Feed
The Beginners Guide to Creating Effective Meta Tags
By Duncan Haughey
As a project manager working in website development it surprises me how little importance some businesses attach to metadata (data about data) on their websites. In fact many don't realise the impact it has on their search engine rankings and how a combination of good keyword rich copy and meta tags can drive significant volumes of traffic to their sites.
As a minimum to rank well in the search engines you need to have a good set of meta tags on every page of your site. The most important are the title and description tag. Many people feel that the keywords tag has little or no importance, but I still like to add it. Try to make sure that the most important keywords appear at the beginning of the meta tags, like in the example below targeting Omega 3.
Meta tags are especially important with sites that contain a lot of Flash because Flash restricts the amount of content the search engines can use to understand what the page/site is about.
As a general rule the meta tags should provide a description of the page and include any keywords that you think people will use in a search. In addition they should follow these rules:
Title
Keep the title short and to the point at around 6 - 10 words.
Description
This should be no more than 150 characters long (including spaces) because some results pages will cut it short. Some experts recommend buffering the main keyword like we have below by adding the word "essential" before Omega 3.
Keywords
Keep these to a maximum of 15 keywords, relevant to the page content and avoid repeating keywords more than 3 times.
| Example |
|---|
|
Title: Omega 3 Ensuring the Best for Your Child Description: Essential Omega 3 fish oil - discover the various ways in which issues relating to parenting can be handled to ensure the best for your child's brain Keywords: Omega 3, kids, children, mums, parenting, brain, games, fun, healthcare, memory, attention, learning |
It is probably stating the obvious, but it is easier to add meta tags to your pages when you create them, rather than retro fit them later.
Some common mistakes to avoid are:
- Keyword stuffing. Unnecessarily repeating keywords in the tags rather than writing something that makes sense to a human-being.
- Using a common set of tags for all pages. Each page should have a its own set of tags tailored to that pages content and targeted keyword(s).
- Using tags that bear no relation to the page/site content in order to dupe people into visiting the page/site.
Meta tags alone will not get you to number one in the search engine listings, but they will certainly contribute a great deal towards a better position and make your listings more user friendly.
