How to optimize meta tags

Author : Darius Medinas

This is one of the next steps towards SEO after you research and optimize your keywords. If you go inside your page code you will see short codes called “meta tags”. You can find them on the header of the page source. “Meta tags” are serving to describe some aspects of your page to the search engines.
To get some ideas how they look, just go to any page on internet and view the source code. Basically you can go to your competitors pages and research what meta tags they are using, similarly as you have done it with your keywords. 

There are five main meta tags you should consider. 

1. Title 

This is most important of the meta tags and I strongly advice to use most important keyword at least once in your title. It’s a headline of your ad. The text you put in your title will appear as the link text in search engine (eg. Google) listings. Also this text appears on top of the browser once the page is displayed and serves as title in bookmarks. Title is not only important for your ranking but also has a big impact on Click Thru Rate (CTR). This is the first bit that people will read and click. Try keep it short and attractive. Ideally maximum of 66 characters as this is what Google displays. 

2. Keywords 

By keyword meta tag search engines identifying a site’s subject material. Put between 7-9 keywords or keyword phrases. The best idea again is to go to your highly ranked competitors web site and research what the keywords they are using. My advice is to optimize only the keywords relevant with the particular page you are working on. 

3. Description 

Include some of your most important keywords from ones you inserted in keywords meta tag. But don’t do it at random. Be destructive as search engines will use and people will see entered text as description of your site. This is the text that appears on Google after the title. Same as the title it has to be informative and attractive. Think of it as the copy of an ad. As Google displays only maximum of 160 characters including spaces, try to keep your description within that number. 

4. Alt 

The alt tag is designed to help visually impaired people use Internet. When some special software encounters a picture, it looks for Alt text and reads it out loud. Once again try to use in Alt text the keywords or keyword phrase, you already inserted in the same page’s keyword meta tag, at least once as the search engines assumes your pictures has something to do with the subject material of your site. 

5. Robots 

There are few different meta tags associated with the robots/spiders. It tells the robots which files to read and which ones not and helps index your site. You can use the same meta tags on every page but I strongly advice to make them unique. All your pages are of different content and might be targeting different keywords. So its very good idea to write different tags for every single page because this allows you to target more specific keywords (also more volume of keywords) and be more objective in your description or title for that particular page.

Article Source : How to optimize meta tags