by Rebecca Mikulin

Created on: July 30, 2010

Meta tag best practices are often disregarded by site owners seeking to optimize their sites. So much emphasis is placed on good content, proper promotion, and other such marketing and optimization techniques that some beginners with SEO and SEM may not even think about or understand their site’s meta tags. Simply put, meta tags are a device for easier site indexing in the search engines, as well as another opportunity to give potential customers a “snapshot” of your site in the search engine results. In many cases, your site’s description will be displayed in text results along with the site title, and if you haven’t set either then you’ll end up showing your customers only your URL and a related blurb from your content page. Setting your own meta tags is akin to landscaping your own storefront…this isn’t something you want done automatically, as it could be a deciding factor in whether or not you get targeted, valuable traffic to your site.

Clear and Concise

Titles and descriptions have to be kept relatively short, easy-to-read and, most importantly, highly relevant to your site’s content. This is an area where you can work your keywords in, especially if they’ve been well-selected for your topic, but it’s not the place to try to stuff in as many as you can. The last thing you want is for your potential customers to be greeted by nothing more than a nonsensical list of keywords that may or may not be directly related to their search. State your business name in the title of your home page and include your location if you want to optimize for your local area. The description should describe exactly what customers will find on your site, not merely which keywords you were attempting to optimize for or a very basic description of the type of business you have.

Eliminate Repeats

There is little benefit to your site if every single page title and description are exactly the same, or very similar. Search engine results will show whichever page of your site is most relevant to the search terms, so it only makes sense to diversify possible results by optimizing tags on each page for different keywords…namely, whichever keywords are the most relevant to that particular page. It’s much more valuable to show one page in each of 50 results than to have 50 pages show up in the results of one search – especially since most of those will likely be hidden under “omitted results”

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