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Using SEO to Get High Rankings for Your Website: Let’s Talk About Meta Tags
by Wendy on July 15th, 2009
I’m the person at Kinesis who typically optimizes the websites for our clients.
So, accordingly, I have a lot of opinions on SEO. There are too many “snake-oil” salespeople who are using outdated or incorrect optimization methods. And some so-called SEO companies are optimizing their clients’ websites using techniques that are unappealing to the visitors of the website – always a bad idea.
Every page on your site must appeal to your prospects and clients first. And search engines come second. Remember this principle when a company comes to you yammering about SEO and how they will get you first page ranking.
Your goal should not just be about getting a high quantity of traffic – this does you no good if you have no potential customers. The point of your website is to act as a sales tool, right? Therefore, it is far, far better to get fewer visitors to your site who are highly qualified, responsive prospects. These are the people who will actually hire your company.
Now let’s take a look at Meta Tags. This is one of the ways that the shysters will tell you they can optimize your site. I’ve created a video to help you see what I’m writing about.
MYTH: SEO is all about Meta Tags. Load a bunch of these magical meta tags into the code of your web pages and you’ll rocket to the top of the search engines.
TRUTH: Uh…no. Meta Tags are not the magic bullet to getting ranked well. They are valuable for giving some control over how the search engines describe a web page – but even this isn’t a given. Meta Tags are a component of your overall SEO strategy but they are a very small component compared to the content that is actually written on your site.
First of all, what is a Meta Tag? These tags are bits of information that is inserted into the <HEAD> area of your website. If you look at the code of a web page, here’s how meta tags appear:
<HEAD>
<TITLE>How to Groom Your Poodle, Dog Grooming Techniques<HEAD>
<META NAME=”description” content=”Tips and techniques to groom your poodle dog so it looks like a champion Best in Show”>
<META NAME=”keywords” content=”dogs, poodle, groom, grooming, show, tips, techniques, dog show”>
</HEAD>
The Title Tag isn’t really a Meta Tag, but this is the most important piece of the data in the <HEAD> area. The text you use in the Title Tag will appear at the top of a person’s browser window. It will also guide the search engines on how to rank your web page.
If you do nothing else as a result of this post, make sure all of your web pages have titles that are relevant to the content on each page. Use a few words that describe the page. You’ll see that I did that in my poodle grooming example above. On each page, change the Title Tag to describe what is on the page.
If geographical location is important to your business then definitely include it in your Title Tags. If you look at the Kinesis website, we get a large portion of our clients from Portland, Oregon. So, I’ve plugged that into the titles. By doing this, our website gets ranked very highly when people search for terms such as Portland web design and Portland graphic design.
Just putting relevant titles on all of your pages will put you ahead of at least 50% of your competitors.
The Meta Description Tag allows you to describe the content of your page. This influences the way that the search engines list your description…maybe. Lately, Google has been listing content from the page in addition to or instead of the description tag. But, for now, it’s worth plugging in to your Meta Tags.
The Meta Keywords Tag is no longer being used by Google because of its abuse by certain programmers, but Yahoo does suggest that they are still using them (although the company does not say how much weight they are giving them for rankings). So it’s pretty easy to include keywords. It may be worth your time since search engine ranking research shows 64% of users conduct their searches using Google and 20% search using Yahoo. From there, 8% use Microsoft sites, 3.8% use Ask, and 3.4% use AOL.
If you have questions, please ask me in the comments section below. And, of course, Kinesis can help you optimize your website. Contact us for more details.
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Great overview Wendy. I totally agree – people first, search engines second!
Great post Wendy! Very nice summary.
It’s amazing how much weight some companies or SEO ‘pros’ place on title and description. Sure they are important, but honestly they mean more to accessibility and usability than to rankings nowadays.
I’m glad you added about content being more important, and from the marketing standpoint it’s huge!
I look forward to reading more articles. Do you or kineses have a twitter account?
Thanks Laura! I hope you liked the screencast!
Thanks Ron! Yes, please visit me at http://www.twitter.com/WendyMaynard
Wendy, this is a fantastic article. I know clients will get a lot out of it. Maybe you could move the video closer to the top of the screen? It’s one of the best parts of the post, and I’d hate to see people miss it!
Yes sir, partner sir!!! Thanks for the props!
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