SEO Cheat Sheet: How to Optimize Your META Tags

Published September 5th, 2011 by Farin Innovations

A key factor in today's websites is the ability to manage your META Tags. Whenever Farin Innovations builds a website, they include this ability to help separate you from your competition. It's very important you take the time to go through your new (or existing website) and optimize your META tags on each page.

For those of you who don't know which tags should be what, let me break it down and make it real simple:

META Title

Your meta title is just as it sounds -- the TITLE of the page. Google uses this code to help decipher the overall content of the page. The title should be a general overview of the content on that page as well as a keyword.

For example, the META title of this page would be the article name and a keyword:

SEO Cheat Sheet: How to Optimize Your META Tags - Miami, FL Search Engine Optimization.

META Keywords

Your META keywords should be 15-20 keywords that relate to not just your website, but this page you are on specifically. The keywords should be words and phrases that are seen in the content. It is very important that they match up, as if Google sees the keywords are not relevant to your content, they will rank you low, thinking that the page is of no importance to its searchers. When inserting your keywords, they should be separated by commas and the commas should be in between phrases, not the words!

The keywords used on this page, for example, would be:

Optimizing META Tags, Search Engine Optimization, META Title Optimization, META Keywords Optimization, META Description Optimization, Miami FL SEO, Miami FL Search Engine Optimization, Miami FL Website Blog, Miami META Tag Optimization,

It's important to note that you want to hit both broad search terms, as well as local search terms, as if you are just beginning in SEO, you're probably not going to hit the more broad search terms. It takes time to build up to the point where you don't need the local words in there to get your content displayed on page 1 (We can help with this! Check out our SEO Services). 

META Description

The META description of a page is he most simple of the three. The description should be a 160 character description of the page. The most accurate way to do this, and the way Google seems to like it best, is to take a few sentences from the content and place it as the description.

For this page, we used the following for the description:

A key factor in today's websites is the ability to manage your META Tags. Whenever Farin Innovations builds a website, they include this ability to help separate you from your competition. It's very important you take the time to go through your new (or existing website) and optimize your META tags on each page.

Setting up proper META Tags on each page will greatly increase your odds of making it to page 1 on the major search engines.

Many other factors come into play, such as, code validation, back-links, content grade, and sitemap accuracy just to name a few. Farin Innovations, Inc. has been helping clients achieve page 1 results with Search Engine Optimization in Miami, FL since 1999.

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