Meta tags are tags used to describe the content of your web-pages. Search engines use meta-tags, amongst many other factors, to determine what a webpage is about. It is crucial that your web pages have well written, keyword rich meta tags to ensure search engines know what each of the pages of your website is about. There are three meta tags that need to be written for each page of your website as well as image alt tags also. In order to see these, simply right click anywhere on a webpage and select the “view source” option.
Title Meta Tag
Title meta tag looks like: <title> Title Goes Here<⁄title>
The title meta tag of a web page should be very succinct and contain the absolute primary relevance key-words and phrases to describe that particular web page. The title meta tag is visible in the blue text on the SERP (search engine results page) for your website so obviously this needs to be accurate.
Description Meta Tag
Description meta tag looks like: <meta name="description" content="Description goes here.">
The description can be a little longer than your title tag but should never be SPAMed with keywords. Again, it needs to be carefully written to ensure it accurately describes the content of the particular web-page. The description of a web page is also visible in the SERP (search engine results page). Amazingly, many webmasters will simply omit description tags despite their importance from an SEO point of view.
H1 and H2 Tags:
H1 meta tag looks like:
<h1>Major Heading Goes Here<⁄h1>
<h2>Minor Heading Goes Here<⁄h2>
Putting your major headings in h1 tags and minor headings in h2 tags lends increased emphasis to the keywords within the tag from a search engine’s point of view.
In order to build a website that really excels from an SEO perspective, the website should contain many relatively small, very well targeted / described pages. Putting too much non-related content on one page dilutes the effectiveness of any of the key-phrases identified as relevant for the page. A page with many different key-phrases in the description will not have a good chance of ranking well against a neat, tidy, well described targeted page. For example, this page is about meta-tags as an SEO tool and nothing else.
Keywords Meta Tag
Keywords meta tag looks like: <meta name="keywords" content="keywords go here">
While there was a time when a few well chosen keywords in this tag was enough to attain a good rank, Google now says that keyword meta tags no longer form part of their ranking algorithm. For a brief video straight from the horse’s mouth so to speak, see the link below:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html
However, Yahoo and Bing still use Keyword meta tags in their algorithms so these should not be omitted.
Image Alt Tags
Image Alt Tag looks like: <img src="imagelocation.jpg" width="295" height="349" alt="text describing the image here">
To see whether your webmaster has used image alt tags, simply hover over any images on your website – if they have been tagged, the name of the image will appear. Search engines cannot read images so unless you use image alt tags, as far as search engines are concerned, they do not exist. All images should be correctly tagged using appropriate keywords where possible.
