You can pay a lot for SEO – but what can you learn, right now, in one minute? An ongoing series.

 “Meta information” is information you can use to describe your website beyond the content on your site itself. Your Content Management system should allow you to add in Meta Information for your website, and for the individual pages on your website.

The three “Meta Tags” that pertain to SEO are called “Meta Title”, “Meta Description” and “Meta Keywords”.

What is the ‘Meta Title’?

The SEO Title appears in the title bar of your web browser, and appears as your site title when your site appears in a google search.

Placing keywords in the SEO Title of your website helps search engines and visitors know what your website is about: placing too many keywords here is a bad idea. Try to emphasise two or three important products and services that you offer - put them early in your title (ie at the start) and follow with your company name.

What is the ‘Meta Description’?

The ‘Meta Description’ is a short paragraph which describes your website. It appears in the google search results list under your SEO Title.

Only a very short amount of text will generally show up, so stick to one or two short sentences. The keywords you use here probably aren’t too important - but this is the text which will entice a searcher to click through to your website rather than another sitting above or below yours: so craft it carefully!

What about ‘Meta Keywords’?

Meta Keywords were used by search engines in the 1990s to rank and classify websites. Search engines do things differently now and don't use these fields.

Some SEO people will advise you to use these fields. You can place keywords into the Meta Keywords field if you wish, but placing a large amount of text here or irrelevant keywords may penalise you. You have nothing to lose by leaving this field blank.

 

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