Filling Out Your Meta Tags

By Kevin McKnelly

Filling out the meta tags for you website helps the search engines find, and index your site.  If you want your website to be found by your potential customers, this is vital.  We offer this service for busy business owners who don't have time to do it, but for those who wish to do it themselves, this article is for you.

For the purpose of this instruction, meta tags are words written into the source code that provide information to the search engines about what is on a particular web page.  There are only three you need to worry about:  The title tag, keyword tag, and description tag.  Filling out these tags helps the search engines find, and index your site.

Before doing this, you should have already done your keyword search (see my article on this), and focused on a list of keywords that are crucial to finding/describing your website.  The content you write on each of your web pages should have these keywords in them.  The most important keywords or phrases should be repeated several times. 

Once you have your list of keywords, you enter some, or most of those keywords in the three tags (depending on the tag).  You should also work those same keywords used in the tags onto your page content. 

With Red Dragonfly, we use a very simple website platform that makes filling out these tags easy.  The following process needs to be completed for each page of your website.  Do your home page first, then the most important pages of your site after that.

To fill out your meta tags in our website platform (MA WebCenters) do the following:

1.  In your browser bar, type w.mawebcenters/admin

2.  You will now be in the login page.  Type in your username and password

3.  On the page that pops up, go to the blue bar and select “website” then “page list”

4.  On the page list, put a check next to the page you wish to fill out the tags, then hit “edit properties”

Here you will see several headings: 

“Short Page Name” (ignore this), “Page File Name” (ignore this), then “Page Title” (which is your title tag).  This is the most important tag to fill out correctly.

5.  You need to type in 9-12 words that give the search engines a good description of what is on this page.  The title should stand on its own and clearly communicate the contents of the page to the search engines.  You must give them context.  A title like "Home" or "About Us" when displayed in search results or bookmarks tells the SE’s nothing about the contents of the page.

You can type in a bunch of words if you want, but you would be best served keeping them between 9-12 words.  They don’t have to repeat, but maybe one word should be repeated in a different phrase.  Some people put dashes and spaces between the short keyword phrases. See below.

Here are some examples:

            Pest Control Services – Residential Pest Control – Commercial Pest Control – Real Estate Escrow   

The italics are used just for this exercise. This title tag is not bad, but a little heavy on pest control.  It is true that pest control is the top key phrase in searching for pest control companies.  Perhaps termite control should be used at least once.  Some people use a | between the words (that is the upper case\):  Pest Control | Termite Control | Pest Services      The verticle line between the words is only for visual purposes, and has nothing to do with optimization.

 Here is another one:

          Cleaning Services Santa Clarita - Commercial Cleaners Santa Clarita – House Cleaners  

If you think people are looking for you in a specific geographic area, it might be wise to include that city/area.  

Other people just put commas between the words.  Others have a plain sentence like:

Dating & Match Making Services for Busy Professional Singles  

The point is: There is no one way to do this.

Now onto the next tag:  "Page Keywords".

This used to be a really important tag, but has become less important to search engines in recent years. You can put more keywords on this tag than on the title tag. I would typically place between 10-30 words/phrases that people use to search for your business.  For more on how to choose these words, read my articles on keywording and the Google Keyword Tool.  Here is what one client of mine wrote for his cleaning service:

Cleaning Services Santa Clarita, Commercial Cleaning Santa Clarita, House cleaning, janitorial services, carpet cleaning, maids, office cleaning, Santa Clarita, San Fernando, Valencia, Stevenson Ranch, Newhall, Saugus, Canyon Country, Sherman Oaks, Burbank

Obviously this client is concerned about people typing in the geographic area, and attaching that somehow to their service.  Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. Don’t overdo the repetition of keywords.  “Cleaning” is used five times in this one.  2-3 would have been enough.

Other examples:  many,keywords,google,adsense,google,adsense,webmaster,WebmasterWorld  

No spaces after the commas. 9 words.

Here is another for a restaurant directory in the Santa Clarita valley:

santa clarita restaurants, valencia restaurants, scv dining guide, Santa Clarita Valley, valencia, scvmall, California

They put a space after the commas.  14 words

Another for a well-optimized Chinese food restaurant in Los Angeles:  

chinese, thai, japanese, china, food, restaurant, chinese restaurant, eat, eating, eats, diner, dining, dine, foods, dragon, dragons, twins, twin, twin dragon, los angeles, angeles, pico, shanghai, take-out, take out, deliver, delivery, cuisine, lunch, dinner, specials

Spaces between commas, lots of words.  So again, there is no one way to do this. 

OK, last tag:  "Page Description"

The "Page Description" is just that:  a description of what is on that page.  Some people just repeat what they put in their keywords meta tag for this. Just make sure you put in some keywords that appear in your content of that webpage.  You can put in possibly more or less than your “page keywords”.  

The more I read about this subject, the more I realize that there is wide disagreement in the industry about the best way to fill out the three meta tags. It also depends on what your product or service is, and what your target market is. There is a lot of agreement on not over-repeating words in your tags.

After completing your meta tags, hit “save”, then “publish” the site.  Then hit F5 to refresh.  

For those of you who are overwhelmed by all this information, we provide SEO packages that include filling out, and submitting your meta tags for you to the search engines.  These packages offer much more than filling out the tags to increase your site’s visibility.  To find out more, click here. For those who have the desire and time to do the tags themselves, I have provided this article.  

Hope this helps!        

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