Are you old enough to remember card catalogs in your local library? Every book in the library had cards filed there which told you where to find the book on the shelf. The card didn’t have the book’s content, just information about the book.
Websites today have a rough parallel: metadata. Each web page can have information on-page that tells search engines about the page, but humans can’t see or read it. Metadata includes the title tag, description, and keywords.
The title tag is what appears at the top of the web browser when someone visits your page. Yes, humans actually get to read this one, but it is very important to the search engines, too.
Meta descriptions are the snippets that people see when your site shows up on the search engine results. This will help people determine if yours is the right search result they are looking for and whether they should click through. You get to write 150 words or less.
Meta keywords are tags or phrases you try to match to both the content of that page and the phrases you think people will be using to ‘google’ for that page. These have become less important because of people’s abuse (stuffing with popular keywords that have nothing to do with your content, etc…).
Composing your metadata has become both an art and a discipline. Here are some great tips from a Top 5 SEO tips-list posted on the San Francisco Examiner site:
- Research your keywords and phrases and always use a unique, keyword-rich tile tag for each page.
- Avoiding using words like “and, or, the, if, it, were” in your title tag. These make the search engines stop reading and move on.
- Keep you title to 57 characters or less.
- Your description tag should be short and no longer than a sentence or two.
- Your keyword tag should always have your primary keyword first, and that keyword should also be in the first sentence on your page content.
- Don’t bloat your keyword tags with dozens of keywords; this will only hurt your ranking potential. Use no more than 10-12 per page.
- If you have more keywords you’d like to use, create additional pages and optimize those pages for each keyword.
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