Meta Tags to Better Rankings
A few years back, most search engines devalued the use of meta-tags in determining rankings, so not all search engines place as much emphasis on all the tags in your <HEAD> section as they once did. Rather, they will just pull from the first text they find on your site page, and display them in their results. This may give less than an ideal description of what your sites are all about. You have probably seen a few weird descriptions in the search engine results page (SERP) and wondered why…well that’s why.
For those search engines that do give some attention to the tags…these tags should be optimized as best you can for your profession and your marketplace. The <Title> tag still is very important. It should not be overly long and should incorporate the most important keyword phrase that represents your business. Most search engines will use this title tag for ranking your site and it is also the title that is displayed on the search engine results page. I have published previous articles in regard to this, so will not revisit this title specific topic.
Let’s spend a moment though looking at your <Meta Description> tag. Usually, most search engines use the Description tag to describe what your site is about when the results are shown on the search engine results page. The length they pull from your meta tags can vary anywhere from 15 words to 30 words or so. MSN uses the first 15ish words, so you should build a really good 12-15 word phrase that will keep MSN happy. However, Yahoo uses up to 30ish words in their site description. So for when Yahoo comes visiting, I would add an additional 10-15 words that expands and enhances the first 15 words. Then, depending on which engine visits your site, the 15 word description makes sense, as does the 25-30 word description for the other.
What am I saying…to clarify, I have a 25-30 word description that if cut at the 15 word mark makes sense to the visitors of MSN searchers, and a full 25-30 description that makes sense to Yahoo searchers. If you don’t plan it this way, you can have a description on the SERP page that seems to be cut off in mid-sentence and not make much sense. Google searchers may also see the first 15 words (or less…and not always).
The <Meta Keyword> tag has really fallen on hard times mostly due to people cramming keywords in that were considered spam, so most engines give very little attention to this tag. Again, refer to my previous article at the above link for more info on this tag.
GraphicalData web site users can tweak all three of these tags on any of their web site pages from the appropriate editing sections provided. And what is cool is that the title and the description is then automatically pulled and inserted into the site map that is generated and linked into your site. So, double important to tweak your tags.
[Note: When modifying your tags, you need to give ample time between modifications for the search engines to re-crawl your site and re-rank your position for any given search term. And hear this…pretty much anything you do here, if the content on your page is not of high quality, original content, then all this is nearly in vain…Get your “House” in order first]
posted by Ozzie Nohre @ 4:22 PM
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