SEO How to optimize for enduring results Part 1 Meta Tags
You’ll get a lot of people that will tell you that meta tags no longer have value from an SEO perspective. I strongly disagree based on my own research and what I know works.
I think people may have formed this impression based on how effective meta tags used to be, back in the days when stuffing the keyword meta full of keywords could get a page ranked highly. This no longer works on a standalone basis and this is taken as proof that you don’t need to bother with meta tags. I have found however, that meta tags still add value when done properly and in the context of the overall optimization of the page.
The key meta tags from an SEM/SEO perspective are the title, description and keyword tags. The title should contain the main keyphrases of the page it is on. This indicates to the search engines that the author of the page really does think the page is about the keyphrases, else why would they be in the title? The description tag should have the key phrases worked into a mini marketing message that will entice surfers to click on that link in the SERPs. This is because the description tag is often picked up by the SEs and used as the short description of the URL that is returned on a SERP. It is a golden opportunity to get the message you want in front of the person who has just searched on your keyphrases. Finally, the keyword meta is something that needs to be used carefully or not at all. Every key word or phrase that is present in the keyword meta MUST be present at least once on the page. Having a word in the keyword meta and not on the page itself can trigger keyword spamming penalties that can hold your page back from a top position on the SERPs. Conversely, having the keywords in the meta and in the page content makes the page look “natural” from an SE perspective… while this won’t have much of an impact on the page’s positioning, it will help. In terms of the number of keywords you can put into the meta tag, the above comments plus the best practices that result in enduring SEO for a page, will dictate that only one to four related keyphrases be present in the meta and in the page content. For very competitive keywords, you will need to focus and optimize the page and content for only one keyphrase per page.
In summary, meta tags do help your pages rank higher in the SERPs when combined with properly optimized on page content. We’ll get into more details on further optimization for the page content later but let me end with this:
Title Meta -> needs to include the key phrase as close to the start of the title as possible
Description Meta -> include the keyphrase in the desc and make sure attractive benefits are included that will convince the searcher to click on your URL
Keyword Meta -> one to four keywords/phrases, all of which need to be present in the body text of the page
All for now, I’ll be posting another aspect of enduring SEO related to on page optimization shortly.
toronto search engine marketing
Based in Mississauga Ontario (a suburb of Toronto), the author helps clients achieve page 1 rankings in Google using multiple Search Engine Marketing techniques, including Search Engine Optimization, Link Building, Web Analytics and SEO friendly web site design.
Toronto Search Engine Marketing 