Search Engine Optimization: The META Tags

Meta tags are important and unbeaten tools for search engine marketing. The Meta tags are HTML tags that facilitate and explain the document they are located in. Search Engines focus on these three primary tags – Title, Description and the Keyword tags to help them (Search Engine crawlers, spiders, bots) verify the relevance of a website for a particular phrase.

The Title tag describes exactly what the document contains, and is one of the most important tags for a search engine. It is the first one to appear in the search engine results, and it should contain keywords (no repetitions) that you would like to be found, with a maximum number of 80 characters including spaces.

Example:

<> BHI Pro IT Solutions Provider | Web Design and Development | SEO services < /title >

The title tags of the web pages can frequently generate rapid and substantial differences to its ranking and because the words in the title tags are what appear in the clickable link on the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). Strategically altering them may result in more click throughs.

The  maximum number characters for the Meta Description tag is 250. This describes the content of a website. This description is not displayed on the page itself, but is largely intended to help the search engines index the page correctly.

Example:

< name=" description " content=" BHI Pro is one of the fastest growing IT Providers, offering Web Design and Development, Managed Outsourcing, E-commerce, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Web Hosting, Domain Registration and many other services for your outsourcing needs. ">

The Meta description tag is a snippet of HTML coding that belongs within the <> ... < /head > segment of a Web page and it is usually placed after the Title tag and before the Keyword tag. The arrangement though, is unnecessary.

The Meta Keyword tag is used to help define the primary keywords of a web page that contains important keywords and phrases consistent with the HTML body text and page title. It has a maximum number of 250 characters including spaces.

Let’s summarize what needs to be done before creating Meta Keyword tags:

• Select relevant keywords
• Write the web site’s content based on these keywords
• Create a Title tag with some of these keywords
• Write a  simple and authoritative Meta description using some of the selected keywords.

If possible, these things should be done before optimizing the web site.

Example:

< name= " keywords" content=" Business Process Outsourcing, BPO Philippines, outsourcing, IT solutions, software development, eCommerce, eMarketing, search engine marketing, Search Engine Optimization, seo, web hosting and maintenance, web application, web design and development ">


These tags (Title, Description and Keywords) are the most important considerations of search engines to determine relevancy in indexing your web pages. And that makes your link architecture very important.

Here's a checklist to consider in creating tags:

Title tags:
• Provides call to action - YES/NO?
• Contains less than 80 characters - YES/NO?
• Uses important keywords and phrases - YES/NO?
• Describes what the page is about - YES/NO?
• Consistent with other content components - YES/NO?

Meta Keywords:
• Contains less than 250 characters - YES/NO?
• Uses important keywords and phrases - YES/NO?
• Minimal repetition of individual words - YES/NO?
• Consistent with other content components - YES/NO?

Meta Description:
• Provides call to action - YES/NO?
• Contains less than 250 characters - YES/NO?
• Uses important keywords and phrases - YES/NO?
• Describes what the page is about - YES/NO?
• Consistent with other content components - YES/NO?

It is impossible to label perfect Meta tag because there is no such thing. Testing different Meta tags and determining which of those tags rank higher is the best possible method there is.