The Meta Tags, Title Tag and Search Friendly Content

Guidelines to create more SEO-friendly pages

by Rupert Sharp
of http://www.oyster-web.co.uk

Last updated: 5 Nov 2007

A recent site I was looking at made me think of how so many people still don't get the Relevance of Meta tags in search engines and their correct usage so I thought I'd set the record straight here.

Meta data is information relating to the web-page in question, the meta tags should always be contained in the header section of a page; this allows search engines to view the relating terms and subject of the following content.
The basic header section of a document should always contain:

<title>This is the title of the page</title>

<meta name="description" content="This is your description">

<meta name="keywords" content="This where your keywords go">

The Title Tag is the most important of these as it identifies what the page is about. The search engines will look at the title tag to get a basic idea of what's to come. All and I mean ALL title tags in a site should be different and unique to that page i.e. If that particular page is about cabbages you would have

<title>All about Cabbages</title>

or something along those lines. Having multiple titles containing the same text can confuse the search engines and doesn’t do you any favours.

Titles should be no longer than around 66 characters so there is not normally much room for branding. If you mention the company name at all it should be at the end of the title and not included on every page of the site - the Home page and the About Us pages will usually be sufficient - otherwise the title is too valuable to waste on company names unless they are very short or contain important keywords.

While not as important as the title tag, the meta description tag is nevertheless a vital part of your meta information and can be imagined is a longer description of the page to come. The description, like the title, should be unique to the page and not contain something like 'JoeBloggs Ltd. is here to make your life easier, our service is second to none and we will aim to deliver only the best to your door', because that is complete fluff. It should be a well-written summary description of that page and should be no more than 180 characters in length. The description should preferably contain some of your key-phrases or related terms, but should also be an eye-catching and appealing phrase as it is normally used as the short description text under the result for your page in the Search Engine listings and therefore acts as advertising copy as well as a description summary for the search engines.

The meta keywords tag is pretty much useless, except in relation to Yahoo, who are the only major search engine who still use the tag’s content. The others long since stopped indexing it. Despite this the keywords tag is one that a lot of people continue to spam, but to no avail as stuffing the keywords tag merely signals the other engines that you are likely to be using dubious techniques elsewhere and reduces your trust. Keywords should be separated with an comma, the total Content should be not too long, should be related to the page they’re on (not to the whole site) and the keywords should already be included in the page’s text content.

Meta tags should be kept simple and should not have pointless ones thrown in for the heck of it,

<meta name="revisit-after" content="1 hour">

is not needed and should be binned immediately. Some of the ones I've seen are comical, people invent meta tags for no reason;

<meta name=”squidgy-cow” content=”Moo moooo moo!”>

will most certainly not hold water in a search engine - they are un-needed clutter for your header tag and do nothing for you except make your pages more code-heavy (which is not a good thing).

All the meta tags should be unique - not duplicates of each other or duplicates of meta's on another page.
Meta's should not be too generalised as this will not help; including your company name in every tag isn't going to increase your Rankings for your company name. If you don’t already rank number one for your company name then you have far more problems than poor meta-tags!

Optimising content

A few guidelines on how to improve you're content and ensure you're getting the right edge on search engine optimisation. Your page content is obviously the most important piece of information on the page, what goes here should be the bed-rock of what the page is about and if you properly structure it, it can boost you're ranking enormously.

Headers are not just decorative, they are an fundamental way of showing the importance of different parts of a document - a header is there to split up the document in order to give it proper structure. Search engines view this information just as a human would, the highest headers:<h1><h2>will be paid more attention to than a <h3> or <h4>

The Headers as said are arranged in order of importance, all pages should contain one <h1> tag, this tag is what you might compare to a second <title> tag, this time for the human user rather than for the browser program. It is heralding what page content is about to come as a whole.

The <h2> tags are basically subheaders, they show the pieces of information that would vary in context but are just as important as each other, if you have a sub-section about the staff in your company you could header it with <h2>The staff at JoeBloggs Ltd.</h2> or just <h2>Staff members</h2> or something similar. As the number complimenting the h (<h?>) gets higher the importance gets lower, there is no need to put too many headers in a document, sometimes if the page only has one main subject just the <h1> will do it but strategic use can make a document more structured and search engines will reward you in the rankings accordingly and just as important they will make a better reading experience for the user.

I have seen sites where they have replaced a header with the <strong> tag, this is not a header and is not treated like a header; it does however bring a tiny bit more attention to it than normal <p> content as does the bold (<b>) tag but generally you should not pay much/any attention to this from an optimisation point of view – their correct use is merely to give inline emphasis. The h tags can be styled using CSS to look like anything you want, and it is preferable to set these specifically as each browser can sometimes interpret them differently.

Along with the headers you should then put in a paragraph <p> tags around all the remaining text that isn’t using any special formatting such as list items or blockquotes. The related header determines how important the text in these areas are. Don’t put bare text inside table cells or div tags without this structural markup.

Focus on writing natural content that incorporates the keywords that relate to the page. Don't just write flannel about how your company is so amazing etc. write something about what it is that you do, keep your keywords in the back of your head as you’re writing content into your pages. If you have keywords that you can't seem to implement into your site properly, then create a page dedicated to whatever subject it concerns. Don't 'over-write' your pages using a keyword over and over again as this can be considered spammy and is often noticeable and makes the page look awful to the user, which will only drive away possible customers.

Use semantics, think of what words you would relate to your keywords and weave them into the text, for example the keyword 'fish' would work well with the word water 'water' so include this word somewhere in the text to add extra relevancy. Yet again don't overdo it or it will be noticed.
Use good Anchor Text for your links, ensure that the text that you use as a link is related to the document that the user will be sent to.