Meta Tag Optimization 101

Mike Siers - May 26, 2011

Optimizing your web page’s meta tags come with a few additional considerations besides keyword selection. In this blog post, lets discuss some Best Practices for optimizing your meta tags for search engine crawlers.

1). The Title Tag — The Title tag is among the most important factors Search Engine Crawlers look for in SEO. It is meant to define what your page is all about, for both search engine crawlers and users who are searching for your site in either Google, Yahoo, or Bing. Here is an image to see how your title tag appears in the search index.

It is an SEO best practice to keep your title tag to 70 characters long, including spaces.

2). The Description Tag — The Description tag is also an important factor for SEO. The description tag should reinforce the title tag and provide a little more information about the page to both the crawler and the user who is searching for your site. When writing your description tag, make sure to include your chosen keywords for the page and clearly define what the pages are   about. Also be sure your sentences are grammatically correct, as users will be reading the description in their search results, as the example image below will show.  

The SEO best practice length for the description tag is roughly 150-180-characters, including spaces.

3). The Keyword Tag — The Keyword Tag is currently not accounted for by search engines, so stuffing a bunch of words you want to rank for is not going to help. A good practice would be to include the keyword or key phrase you are optimizing the page for, just in the event that one day Google makes a change and starts to again account for the keyword tag in their algorithm.      

Once you have selected your keywords, following these guidelines will ensure you are using Best Practices for optimizing your meta content. There is no need to over-do-it when writing meta content. Simply do your best to optimize each page with a single and unique keyword or phrase. Make sure each page has unique meta tags related to that keyword and you will likely see increases in your rankings.