SEO Best Practices Part 2

Meta Tags

Description <meta name=”description” />

A page’s “description” meta tag gives search engines a summary of what the page is about. Whereas a page’s title may be a few words or a phrase, a page’s description meta tag might be a sentence or two or a short paragraph. Google’s Content Analysis Section will tell you about any description meta tags that are too short, long, or duplicated too many times.

Accurately summarize the page’s content

Write a description that would both inform and interest users if they saw your description meta tag as a snippet in a search result. Be sure to include your keywords and key phrases as well.

• Example: Rare vintage stamps from around the United States that date all the way back to the early 1800s.
• Avoid:
  • Writing a description meta tag that has no relation to the content on the page
  • Using generic descriptions like “This is a webpage” or “Page about stamp collecting”
  • Filling the description with only keywords
• Never: Copy and paste the entire content of the document into the description meta tag

Unique descriptions for each page

Having a different description meta tag for each page helps both users and search engines, especially in searches where users may bring up multiple pages on your domain. If your site has thousands or even millions of pages, hand-crafting description meta tags probably isn’t feasible. In this case, you could automatically generate description meta tags based on each page’s content.

• Example:
  • 1st Page – Rare vintage stamps from around the United States that date all the way back to the early 1800s.
  • 2nd Page – Misprinted stamps that were never meant to make it to the general public.
• Avoid: Using a single description meta tag across all of your site’s pages or a large group of pages

Keywords

These are words that describe the content of that page separated by commas. Although it has been speculated that Google and Live don’t use the meta keywords, and Google didn’t provide documentation on best practices for this, Yahoo, Ask, and others do. Using them definitely doesn’t hurt your chances for higher page rankings. Also, it is important to understand that each page’s content will most likely be different from the next and will probably have different keywords that will need to be associated with it.

Accurately summarize the page’s “key” words

Write keywords that are relevant to your site content. Also, use plural versions of your keywords when appropriate, you will get hits from people looking for singular and plural versions of the word.

• Example: “stamps, collecting, rare, vintage”
• Avoid: Using words that don’t appear in the page content at all. If you have the keywords “stamp collecting” in a meta tag but do not have the words in the content of your page, it is very unlikely that those keywords will help the page do well for ranking.

Keyword popularity with search engines

Are targeted keywords popular phrases used in search engines? A simple keyword search in a search engine will tell you how popular they are. You could also dig through your referrer logs or Web analytics data to determine which search engines send your site considerable traffic for which phrases.

Keywords used by competitors

Check your competitors to see what keyword usage they have. Sometimes they have already done the keyword hunt and you can cross-reference your words with theirs.

Key phrases vs. keywords

Single keywords are much more commonly entered by web users, which make them more difficult to target effectively than multi-word key phrases. Unless the single keywords are highly unique, your best results will be achieved using key phrases. Consider using key phrases when applicable.

• Example: Try using key phrases like “vintage stamps” versus “stamps”.
• Avoid: Creating repeated keywords in attempts to make key phrases “new, stamps, vintage, stamps, stamp, collecting” as it will have negative effects in ranking as you duplicated the word “stamp” three times.

Special timing for keywords/key phrases

Depending on your industry, you might consider creating a calendar of keywords and key phrases for future reference. In some industries, the popularity of given keywords can fluctuate throughout the year. Site owners operating in such industries might find it worthwhile to keep a calendar that lists which keywords and key phrases are popular at different times of year.