One of the most basic aspects of content writing is crafting the perfect meta tag to go with it. In an earlier post, we discussed that meta tags are one of the most basic elements of SEO and that they have been around for a really long time. A lot of people feel that meta tags are complicated and some might even argue an altogether different language like computer code.

The Significance of Meta Tags

In reality, meta tags are essentially 150 to 160 words that describe what your website is, what it does and for whom. According to Moz.com, “Meta descriptions are HTML attributes that provide concise explanations of the contents of web pages. Meta descriptions are commonly used on search engine result pages (SERPs) to display preview snippets for a given page.”

We discussed in an earlier post that meta tags aren’t as powerful and useful as they once were, however, applications for meta tags are still many and relevant. The gist of what I’m saying is that meta tags might not have much of an impact on search engine optimization anymore but if you craft your meta tag for people then that’s an altogether different ball game.

At the end of the day, one of the best ways your content can help your website is by converting people from passive supporters to active advocates of your cause.  One of the best ways to start converting people is by getting them interested in your content. Meta tags are the starting line in any search related competition. The first very first thing a prospective searcher will find in your website is your meta tag.

The image shows SEO Hacker’s meta tag. It is direct to the point and it tells people exactly what to expect in the website. This is also the very first thing people will see when they look up “SEO Hacker” on their favorite search engine.  Of course, there are many more examples out there which you can see for yourself. Look up any keyword and the most important factor to convince you that this is the article that you want to read is, of course, the meta tag.

Using the Meta Tag

The Meta Tag is widely in use in many applications and websites. Majority, if not all blogs allow its content creators to craft a meta tag for their current post. Meta tags are vital to catching a reader’s attention and popular social media websites such as Facebook understand that.

As you can see in the screenshot provided above, highlighted in red, Facebook appreciates the importance of meta tags as the first real step a person can take before they choose to view your content.

Google constantly monitors the rankings and if no one clicks on a certain link then that link will be bumped down the rankings making them even less visible in search engines. One of the most important things to remember is that creating worthwhile content is important, sure, but getting people to actually read it is a challenge that can be won with meta tags.

Crafting the Perfect Meta Tag

We’ve established that meta tags are important because they are the determining factor for people to either read your content or go for a competitor’s. Creating the perfect meta tag for your post or website isn’t rocket science and anyone can do it with practice and guidance. Here’s are some things to understand in order to start crafting your own meta tag:

1. Limitations – Meta tags are short and concise descriptions about your post and maybe even about your website. While it is tempting to write an impassioned 500 word tell-all about your post, it is best to limit your meta tags to 150 to 160 words. This isn’t entirely because it is better to be short concise, this is because Google will only display the first few hundred words as your meta tag. Any longer and it will simply trail off, leaving an incoherent thought.
2. Stand-out – There are many SEO specialists out there and even seasoned blog writers that have found success in meta tags but not everyone is as fortunate. The best way to get noticed is by standing out. Make your meta tag as unique as possible. Some people tend to stuff keywords in their meta tags but since we’ve established that meta tags don’t help with SEO, then it is a much better practice to write your meta tags for humans.
3. Impact – Contrary to popular belief, it isn’t really considered good practice to write abstract promises on your meta description. The best way to go about things is by using power words. People like confidence and they are more likely to trust your website if it is confident over a website that is unsure of itself.
4. Title – A good supplement for a well written meta tag is the meta title itself. It is an even shorter description of what your post or website is about but it is the very first thing other than the meta tag that people will notice on your website. The impact of titles are so good that some websites now opt for click-bait titles over a more meaningful meta description. The best way to go about this is to create a balance by creating the perfect title to supplement the ideal meta tag.
5. Solve Problems – One of the easiest things to forget about searching stuff up online is the fact that most people do it because they have a problem that needs to be solved. If you offer specific services then let people know about it!
6. Triple Check your Meta Tag – To avoid having a messy or embarrassing looking meta tag then it would be considered good practice for you to triple check what you’re writing. Make sure that your message is coherent and solid.
7. Have fun – Nobody likes boring content. One of the best ways to go about creating the perfect meta tag is by having fun. Let people know that your website is about connecting with them. One of the best ways to attract people to your website is by letting them know that your website is one that inspires happiness or at the very least, customer satisfaction.
8. Be Concise – It is also important to know that the best way to use meta tags is to be concise and straight to the point. Avoid saying too many things and instead, say what you mean to say while maximizing the limits of the meta tags.

There are many ways to write the perfect meta tags and some of them could be done by combining some of the advises that I listed here. Do not be afraid to fail with your first attempts at meta tags. Remember, like anything else worth pursuing in the world, practice makes perfect.

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Changes have come and gone over the years and spammers and exploiters who abuse SEO tactics have had their way in stuffing their meta tags with a lot of keywords – even unrelated ones.

Now meta tags have a different use. And it is arguably hardly an effective means to affect your search engine rankings. Aside from the <title> tag, there is not much use for meta tags anymore. So I’ve come up with what little use meta tags still has for your website’s SEO.

This short course has four distinct lessons:

• What are Meta Tags and why are they important?
• What search engine crawlers do with your meta tags
• How Meta Tags should be used for SEO
• What Meta Robots Tag are for

After the course you will have a better uderstanding of:

• What Meta Tags are
• How you can use Meta Tags for SEO
• How search engines values Meta Tags
• What effect Meta Tags have for your website
• What Meta Robots are
• What effects Meta Robots have for your SEO
• How Meta Tags are retrieved from your website
• How Meta Tags affect Search Results Rankings

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What are robots meta tags for?

Quick Answer: Robots meta tags are pieces of code that instruct search engine robots. These HTML snippets tell them what they can and cannot do on your page. It’s a way of controlling how your pages are crawled and indexed, and how your content is displayed in the SERPs.

Overview

Have you ever wondered what the robots file in your website is for? Maybe you’re using WordPress and you stumble upon this certain, unfamiliar tag that says <meta name =”robots” content=”index”>.

What the heck is it!? Is it a robot that automates your meta tags? Is it a piece of magical SEO tag? Does it summon the Google robot to your page?

Meta robots tag is a tag that tells search engines what to follow and what not to follow. It is a piece of code in the <head> section of your webpage. It’s a simple code that gives you the power to decide about what pages you want to hide from search engine crawlers and what pages you want them to index and look at.

Another function of the meta robots tag is that it tells search engine crawlers what links to follow and what links to stop with.

When you have a lot of links going out of your website you should know that you lose some Google juice. And as a result, your page rank would lower down.

So what you want to do is to keep that juice to yourself with some of the links—and you tell the search engine crawlers not to follow the links going out of your site because in doing so, they will also take some of your Google juice with them.

If you don’t have a meta robots tag though, don’t panic. By default, the search engine crawlers WILL index your site and WILL follow links.

Let me make it clear that search engine crawlers following your links is not bad at all. Losing some of your juice won’t affect your site much in exchange for getting the attention of other websites you’re linking out to.

In fact I don’t recommend using nofollow at all if you don’t have too much outbound links.

Basically the meta robots tag can be cracked down to four main functions for the search engine crawlers:

• FOLLOW – a command for the search engine crawler to follow the links in that webpage
• INDEX – a command for the search engine crawler  to index that webpage
• NOFOLLOW – a command for the search engine crawler NOT to follow the links in that webpage
• NOINDEX – a command for the search engine crawler NOT to index that webpage

Pretty simple isn’t it? Now you’re telling yourself “Heck is that all? I thought it was some crazy program that takes years and years to study.”

Well there are some more commands for the meta robots tag but these four are the MAIN functions. These four are what meta robots tag are mostly used for.

If you ask me, meta robots tag are little things in your site’s SEO that you can use to control your Google juice. I personally don’t use the noindex but I do sometimes use nofollow. Don’t ask why. It’s personal. Haha!

An example of a meta robots tag code would look like this:

<meta name =”robots” content=”index”>

What this tag does is to index the webpage which it is on. It’s like telling someone who’s going to get a glass of water to get a glass of water. Because again, by default, search engine already indexes your site even if you don’t use this code.

And you can also combine the commands if you so desire:

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow”>

For me, this code is a good thing to keep in mind – especially if you’re trying to save up Google juice by applying nofollow to your outbound links. Other than that, it’s not something you’d want to keep on checking when you’re optimizing your on-site SEO.

Tips for Keeps

We all want to know all the little things about SEO. This is something that might help in the future so try to remember it. This code isn’t developed for nothing. The most skilled SEOs know how to use this best.

For further reading, you can go to the article about meta robots in Search Engine Land.

The post What Meta Robots Tag Are For appeared first on SEO Services Agency in Manila, Philippines.

Meta tags are words in your code which users will not be able to see. It’s effect on SEO has become less and less over the years due to the abuse of webmasters in stuffing keywords inside the meta tags. It used to affect rankings, now it doesn’t. It used to be a factor in the retrieval of the indexed site, now only 2 search engines are left practicing that. But SEO experts, according to Danny Sullivan still do use it for things we might not have been able to think of. So how does SEO experts use Meta tags?

SEO Experts use Meta tags for Misspellings

Since we already know that Yahoo and Ask uses Meta tags to at least retrieve or recall indexed information, you would want to use your meta tags to target people who might misspell your keywords with their search engine query. Putting misspelled keywords in your site’s visible content would be embarrassing and would look quite unprofessional. Here’s your chance to get those misspellers into your website – put the misspelled keywords in your meta tags.

Misspellers are most probably looking for the right thing any way, it’s just that they didn’t do too well in their english spelling subject. Which means that they are still potential conversions for you! You just need to exert a little extra effort in helping them out with their spelling bee score in Google.

SEO Experts use Meta tags for Synonyms

Using synonyms in your site is something that we all do. But we try to minimize using it because we want to focus on our keywords and try to populate our content with it. SEO experts sometimes leave the synonyms in the meta tags in order for them to get traffic from people who aren’t directly using their keywords but are probably looking for the same thing. Although it would still be much better if you use these words inside the body of your content to enable all search engines to read it.

SEO Experts use Meta tags for textless pages

There are still websites which are design and entertainment oriented. These are the kind of sites which packs a lot of flash and pictures and very few to no text at all. In cases like this, meta tags would be helpful. 2 search engines being able to find you is better than no search engine visibility at all. That is exactly why we want content in a website – although that’s another topic altogether.

So there you have it, these three are some of the ways that an SEO expert uses meta tags. It’s not much, but you’d want every little detail to help in SEO.

Tips for keeps: Study any possible misspellings with your site’s keywords and try to experiment with the meta keywords and see what happens. It won’t hurt to go the extra mile to get a little more targeted traffic.

This entry is part of the SEO Hacker School series: Using Meta Tags for SEO

If you want this tutorial to be sent straight to your email inbox, please subscribe in the text area below

Next Lesson: What Meta Robots Tag are for

The post How Meta Tags should be used for SEO appeared first on SEO Services Agency in Manila, Philippines.

Meta tags are codes in your website’s <head> portion. They are invisible to the users and are by far, the only legal way to have unseen keywords in your website. Don’t you ever wonder what search engines do with your meta tags since we know that it doesn’t affect page ranking anymore? I know I do. So I read some articles about it and found out from Search Engine Land what exactly your meta tags is being used for by the search engine crawlers.

There are three things that a search engine crawler does with your meta tags:

1. Indexing: When a search engine crawls your page, it replicates a copy of your HTML code and stores it in its database. This is called indexing. All your meta keywords are indexed by Google – it is aware of your meta keywords and has stored it up. Even so, it doesn’t mean it uses it in any way else. It just stores it up.

2. Retrieval: Also termed  by information research professionals as “Recall”, is how a search engine reacts to the people surfing the web and looking for something.  The search engine retrieves what it has indexed about your website and will compare it with the search query of the user. It matches if the documents it has indexed are relevant with the search query the user has initiated. While it does look at the sites it has indexed, it does not necessarily mean that it will go through the indexed document completely – meaning that it will not necessarily go through the meta keywords for retrieval and matching with the search query. I know Google doesn’t, although I’ve read that Yahoo does.

3. Ranking: Now this is where it goes down to business. Ranking is also termed as “Precision” because it is all about putting the best, and most accurate and relevant stuff up top. The ranking algorithm between search engines vary. Some say that for Yahoo, meta keywords still hold water albeit very shallowly so. For Google, I’ve heard that meta tags hold no weight at all in their ranking algorithm. Any way you put it, meta tags can do very little to none with your page rankings.

Now that we have that established, what exact uses does meta tags have in your website? What does SEO experts use meta tags for? I’ll be talking about this in my next entry so watch out for it!

Tips for keeps: Don’t focus too much on your meta tags. Yes it does help, but it helps minimally. You should focus on SEO factors with more weight in relation to your site’s page ranking.

This entry is part of the SEO Hacker School series: Using Meta Tags for SEO

Next Lesson: How Meta Tags should be used for SEO

The post What Search Engine Crawlers do with your Meta Tags appeared first on SEO Services Agency in Manila, Philippines.

Meta tags have been around since… Since I can remember. They have been a big part in search engine history. They were valued as a factor in rankings before – until people started abusing their use in getting on top of the SERPs. After that, Google opted for meta tags out of the ranking factors. But that doesn’t mean they’re not important anymore. Meta tags still play quite a big role in your site’s SEO.

Meta tags are the words that are hidden in your code. People browsing your site will just not be able to see them. It is, as Danny Sullivan puts it, a ‘legal’ way of hiding words in your webpages for search engines. The search engines still read them for it to have a simple, summarized idea of what your site is about and what exactly your keywords are.

Meta tags are located inside your html’s head area. These tags are what you should learn about after being well-versed in HTML tags.

<head>Meta tags are located here</head>

There are three important parts of Meta tags that you can use:

1. Title – The title tag is the title text that is shown in search engine listings. I know that this is not necessarily a meta tag, but it similarly functions like one.

<title>Title text here</title>

2. Description – The meta description tag is where you would want to put your site’s summary. This is where you put what your site is all about and what you are offering people. It should not be too long because the search engines only read up to a certain number of words.

<meta name=”description” content=”This is where you put your site’s summary”/>

3. Keywords – The meta keywords tag is where you put all of the keywords you use on your site. This is basically where you want the words which will take you to the top of the SERPs page to be. Your keywords are important – even if you take away all of the other words, the user should be able to know what your site is all about when they read your keywords.

<meta name=”keywords” content=”SEO, Hacker, Google, Search, etc”/>

These three things make up your meta tags.

The importance of meta tags is that the search engines read them in order to compare if these keywords and the description are related to the visible content. Are your keywords present in your webpage? Is your meta description related to your content and your site’s niche? There is a certain weight in your meta tags that the search engines see, that being the reason, wouldn’t you want to do everything in order to bring your page a little bit higher in the SERPs? That’s exactly the reason why meta tags are important.

Tips for Keeps: Even if meta tags do not hold much water when it comes to page ranking, their importance is still present as the search engine robots validate their relativity to your content and site niche.

This entry is part of the SEO Hacker School series: Using Meta Tags for SEO

If you want this tutorial to be sent straight to your email inbox, please subscribe in the text area below

Next Lesson: What Search Engine Crawlers do with your Meta Tags

The post What are Meta Tags and why are they important? appeared first on SEO Services Agency in Manila, Philippines.