Just How Good is Your Website -- Metatags

Just How Good is Your Website?
21 July 2001

Metatags

Metatags are tags that appear in the code of your page. They're not visible to the person looking at the page through their browser, but they are visible to people who look at the source code. The metatags and the title tag help give you some control over how your site is indexed and how it is described when results are displayed on search engines.

Give yourself the full ten points if you've got metatags for keywords and description that conform to the following guidelines and you have them on all your pages.

The Title Tag tells the browser and any spiders that read the page what the page is about. It's what shows up at the top of the browser when you visit the page. It's what most catalogs use as the page title. Catalogs often sort title alphabetically.

Your title should be the kind that accurately describes your page when it stands alone in a listing of other titles. It should use as many of your keywords as possible, because search engines spiders give words in the title special weight.

So try to get as many of your keywords in as possible, but keep the length under about 70 characters.

The Keyword Metatag is what search engines use to index your site. It's what they match against whatever key phrases someone has typed into their search engine in order to determine relevance.

Keyword metatags should be less than 1000 characters, including spaces and punctuation. Keywords and key phrases should be separated by commas. Limit repetition of any key word or phrase to five times.

Be sure to include your organization name and location, along with any common misspellings. If you check the keyword metatag for this page, you'll find both "Wally Bock" and "Wally Bach."

Sites like selfpromotion.com give you tools that help you develop different combinations of your keywords to use on your site.

The Description Metatag is a short description of the page in human language. Some search engines use it as the description of your site when they display results.

Keep the description metatag under 200 characters, including spaces and punctuation. Try to get as many of your key words and phrases into the description as you can, but make sure the description makes sense when someone reads it. Remember, this is the part of your site that may appear in search engine results and will be what the human being evaluates as to whether it's worth visiting.

Metatags are important, because they enable you to do lots of things. They make that site-specific search engine work, and they make it easier to promote your site and its pages to search engines.

Be careful of one thing, though. If you're using dynamic pages -- pages that are created on the fly -- then you may want to have static pages for some of your key entry points, so that you can have metatags in them. Some of the search engines still can't sort out metatags from dynamic pages.

Top of page