Marc McDermott

Meta tagging your websites

Posted on 02. Feb, 2010 by Marc McDermott in SEO

I’d like to talk a little about writing quality sets of title, Meta, and header tags and some general principles to abide by. In this example, let’s take a look at a personal injury lawyer website and produce one set of data for the homepage.

Before actually writing these tags, it’s important to understand the primary role they play in your SEO campaign. The title tag is one of the most important components of a webpage in which to tell Google, “…this is what this page is about.” Whether Google chooses to ‘believe’ that tag represents the page is up to them, but that is a much different story all together. I like to refer to the title tag, especially the first 70 characters of the tag, as valuable real estate in which to place important, and relevant keywords. Not using the tag properly or maliciously is a shameful waste of that valuable real estate.

Next we have description tags. The proper use of description meta tags is often overlooked as so many people attempt to stuff too many keywords in the sentence, making it unreadable gibberish. I still believe that many SEO’s cannot grasp the concept of description tags no longer playing a factor in rankings (that is not to say they don’t play a factor in the rankings for personalized search and/or logged in Google users). Meta description tags should describe the page and serve as a marketing pitch to draw more clicks to your site from the SERPs. And always remember that Google can choose to display a description snippet of whatever they feel is most relevant to the search query; they do not have to display the description you’ve written.

On to meta keywords tags. This topic will receive as much as my attention as it deserves; none. Google, Yahoo, and Bing have all publicly stated that they do not read the meta keyword tag; case closed.

Similar to your description tag, your main header tag (H1) should be used to reaffirm to the visitor that they have indeed landed on a page they’d expect based open what they clicked on in the SERP. The way I write H1 tags would be to either repeat (with slight variation) the title tag, or provide a complimentary reciprocal version of the title tag’s main keyword. If my title tag is: Fort Lauderdale Personal Injury Lawyers – Firm Name Here, then naturally my H1 tag will be: Personal Injury Lawyer in Fort Lauderdale. The value of an H1 is really a fusion of your title and description; half for the search engines and half for the user.

NOTE: All of these general principles aside, the first and foremost rule to follow is that of relevance and value added for the user. All of your tags must be relevant to the page they’re written for. For more fantastic tips, take a look at this article from Search Engine Land.

So for this Fort Lauderdale injury attorney site, here is the data set I would used based upon the above principles:

• Title: Fort Lauderdale Personal Injury Lawyers – Firm Name Here, P.A.
• Description: Personal injury attorneys in Fort Lauderdale, Firm Name Here represent clients involved in personal injuries, car accidents, and injuries in the workplace.
• Keywords:
• H1: Personal Injury Lawyers in Fort Lauderdale

So there you have it. It truly is not rocket science. Move away from writing these sets of data solely for the search engines and more into driving visitors to your site and keeping them there.