5th June 2018 by James
Welcome to the first in a series of website design, SEO and content writing tips. This series is intended to help the non-technical person gain an understanding of what they can do themselves to improve their website in a variety of ways.
What are meta details
Normally when people speak about meta details it is in relation to search engine optimisation (SEO), or the art of improving their websites rankings on Google. There are many other uses for them but for the purposes of this article we will stick to what matters for SEO.
Over the years search engines, primarily Google, have regularly changed the rules for how pages are ranked. As a result many techniques that used to work now have no effect, or worse they actively damage your website. One such example is keyword stuffing, whereby website owners would just repeat popular keywords or phrases as many times as possible on their web pages and meta tags. As Google has gotten 'smarter' it is better able to recognise properly written, unique content and will elevate such content above poorly written keyword heavy spam pages.
This leaves us in the slightly awkward position of wanting to include popular keyphrases in our content but without overdoing it and risking being penalised. Previously this is where the 'keywords' meta tag would have come in, however Google has confirmed it has dropped this as a ranking factor due to the overuse of it for keyword stuffing. So instead we need to focus on the other two meta tags: title and description.
Meta Title
The meta title is an extremely important ranking factor, it is also displayed on the search results page as the link people click on, and at the top of their browser when they are on your page. This means that you not only have to make it relevant to search engines, you have to make it user friendly so people will click on it, and recognisable when people have a whole screenful of tabs open and want to get back to the one containing your web page.
Google search results typically show up to the first 60 characters of your title. So make sure you have enough information here to convince people to click. You should start with a key phrase specific to the page and end with your websites name, something like:
How To Write Better Meta Tags | Web Design Tips Blog | Pixel Puppet
Meta Description
The meta description is also important and is often shown as the text snippet in Googles search results. So again it needs to contain search engine friendly key phrases but still be written in a style that will attract clicks.
You have a bit more space to play with for descriptions, typically 160 or so characters is considered ideal so you have scope to include a couple of extra keywords in here. Make sure you replicate keywords used in your content though, it's no use telling Google one thing in your meta tags and something else in the page content. The example below shows we are replicating some of the keywords used on our home page in the description:
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To really optimise your website ensure that every page has unique 'meta tags' as Google does not like replication, because it will appear to them (their search algorithm) that you are replicating content a big no no. Well written meta tags play a big part in achieving better search engine results. The simpler and clearer you can describe the page content with keyphrases that are relevant and that have high volume of searches, the better your chances of that page being ranked. I will be writing an article on how to chose the best keyphrases for your pages, but in the meantime if you are not feeling confident in writing your own or would like to research what keyphrases have higher volumes of search, then speak to an
SEO copywriter, we have a few listed in our directory. They will be able to professionally advise you on the best approach.
I hope you learnt something new today.
