Last updated on February 28th, 2019
I often wonder about meta tags and how best to leverage them for better rankings. True, they’re not as important as they used to be but they are still an integral part of getting to the top of the search engines.
In the early days of SEO and the Internet, meta tags were a lot more important to accomplishing ranking goals…get as many keywords into the document as possible was the mantra. But with search engine’s evolving alongside other technologies, they’re not just looking at meta tags and keywords but whether you have original content that’s creative and compelling too.
But that doesn’t diminish the contribution meta tags can make to help you achieve high rankings.
Nevertheless, just what are the right ways to go about making meta tags? Before getting into that too far though, you need to know the different types of meta tags: title, description and keyword.
Each are pretty self-explanatory – the title tag is the title visitors will see in the top left of their browsers, description appears underneath the search results and describes what your page is about and keyword tags list all of the applicable keywords for the particular page.
Technically speaking, there is no limit to how many characters you can use for each of these meta tags…however, there is a limit to what Google will display so you will want to keep a few limits in mind…a good rule of thumb for the different tags is:
Title: 9-12 words max
Description: 3-4 sentences
Keyword: up to 10 keyword phrases
Besides these limits, simply try and integrate keywords into your meta tags without sacrificing the flow of anything too much (title and description tags). These are things people will read and the search engines will perhaps think you’re keyword stuffing penalize your site.
Take a look at a sample set of meta tags from one of SEO Advantage’s web pages below. Modeling your meta tags like these will help you get the most benefit from having them in the first place. This is how they will appear in your page’s HTML coding.
<head>
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1″ />
<title>Search Engine Optimization & Search Engine Marketing Services Company: SEO Advantage, Inc.</title>
<meta content=”Search engine optimization and search engine marketing services company: SEO Advantage, Inc.,offers online web site marketing and optimization services including search engine marketing and optimization, SEO Buzz Marketing, optimized press releases, and web site development.”>
<meta content=”search engine marketing company,search engine optimization services,SEO specialists,consultants,web site marketing,web site promotion,search engine promotion,search engine reporting,press release optimization,search engine marketing firm,florida search engine optimization.”>
Remember, meta tags aren’t as important as they once were but you can still harness them to improve your position in the search engines.