Starting a Business | SEO & Google

SEO Meta Tags

Your message to the search engines is often hidden within the code that makes up the site - it may be out of sight, but it's no less important. Here's how to pimp it up.

Your battle plan

Of all the information you can include in the header of your site, your title is by far the one that's most appreciated and regarded by Google. This dictates the bit of text that appears right at the top of the page of your own or your user's web browser, and it's confirmation that they've arrived at the correct destination and your site has what they want. For example, if I had a site selling rare stamps I'd want the title to reflect something along the lines of 'rare and hard-to-find stamps, for serious collectors - 24-hour delivery'.

Your keywords are the words that you feel your website should be ranked under. For instance, if you sell skateboards and related products, your homepage keywords are going to want to include the words skaters will be interested in -

< META name="keywords" content="skate shoes, footwear, skateboarding, heelys, skateboards, inline skates, skate clothing, hoodys, t-shirts, tees, jeans">

But the classic problem, which most websites have, is coming up with a great list of keywords and then repeating them on every single page. No! Keep it specific. Only use a keyword (or for that matter a reference in your title or description) if the word is used in the page within the body text - if not, you'll be penalised.

My developer said that Google doesn't pay any attention to keywords any more - and they'd be right, they don't. But although this is about Google, I'm not blinkered enough to ignore the other search engines out there that do pay attention to meta keywords - in fact, that's a whopping 20% of the search market, constituting one in five of your potential traffic. Not to be sniffed at or ignored. Put it like this, the day Amazon stops using meta keywords is the day I'll stop; these people spend millions researching the web.

Meta description

So someone does a Google search and they're presented with about twelve results per page. They see a long list of web addresses and a bit of introductory text about the site. where do you think that text comes from? Well, if you don't include a meta description it will be randomly chosen from a page on your site, and, quite frankly, might not make an awful lot of sense. Alternatively, you can add a meta description, which is a short, one- or two-sentence description of your website. This should also be a sales message to potential visitors - so what's going to make them click on your link and not a competitor's? Strong, clean copy is the answer: a sales message, a teaser, a call to action to encourage them through to you.


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