Lesson Six – Optimising other Metatags

In addition to the ‘title’ tag we optimised last time, there are a few other important tags which need our attention.

What follows is instruction on how to structure the rest of the tags for your homepage – although these same instructions will be applied to the rest of our website as we move forwards.

So, the ‘title’ tag is the most important from a ranking point of view, and here are the others we’ll focus on:-

1. The ‘description’ tag – will have a marginal effect on ranking but its importance is that it will maximise click throughs to your site if we structure it properly

2. The ‘keyword’ tag – has little value for the main search engines nowadays, but we might as well structure it since lesser search engines still use it

3. The ‘h1′ tag – there are a series of ‘h’, or header tags which add structure to our on-page content. The h1 is the most important from a ranking point of view. Its not essential to have such a tag but it will make a difference in competitive situations.

4. ‘Alt’ tags – tags which enable us to add text to images. Essential for accessibility and also useful for general ranking (and certainly for ranking of images when image searches are conducted)

So, lets take a look at where these tags show up. If you go to google and search for ‘industrial computers’, you should get ….

You’ll see the listing in 3rd place is Bluechiptechnology, one of our customers (you should be impressed if you notice top right that they are 3rd from almost 1 billion competing pages!). The blue/purple link is of course their ‘title’ tag, and the text immediately below is the contents of their ‘description’ tag.

If you go to their homepage – www.bluechiptechnology.co.uk – and view the source code (as you practised doing in the previoius lesson 5), you will see the detail of the description tag in the 5th line down….

You’ll also see, directly below it, the ‘keyword’ tag. So heres some detail on exactly how to structure your homepage description and keyword tags….

The Description Tag

The importance of this tag is that it will drive click throughs to your website if its well structured, so here’s how to construct it:-

1. You have around 25 words you can show here, so use them all if you can to maximise the visibility of your listing

2. Make it a bit salesy or ‘call to action’ oriented – again to encourage click throughs

3. You’ll see that search engines highlight the keyphrases in this tag that have been search for, as you can see in this example of a search for ‘dr martens’….

So, I recommend you have at least one repetition of the phrase in the tag (and no more than two)

Keyword Tag

As mentioned previously it has little value nowadays but its ‘best practice’ to include one. I’d include no more than 4 phrases in this tag, and, importantly, make sure they are phrases which appear in the ‘title’ and ‘description’ tags….

Now the h1 tag…

H1 Tag

Content wise it should be very similar to your ‘title’ tag – except that its visible on your webpage, so it should be modified accordingly.

In the following example you’ll see the contents of the H1 tag displayed at the top of the web page, and if you view the source code you’ll see the ‘title’ tag has similar content because the phrases ‘label holders’, ‘floor marking solutions’, and ‘warehouse rack labels’ are the phrases this page is optimised for…

If you view the source code and search for h1 you’ll see exactly how this tag is structured…

I think that’s enough tuition for now, we’ll address the ‘alt’ tagging two lessons hence. If you have taken in all this that’s great and if you now change these homepage tags you’ll have a pretty well optimised homepage.

If you are itching for a bit more, here’s a really useful tool you can play around with to see a ‘spider’s’ view of your metatags and content…A Useful SEO Tool

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