Don’t get Meta stuck on the Brain

There is so much, and always has been a lot of emphasis on meta title tags, descriptions and key words. These are page elements and represent not only the first clue the search engines get about the page, but also appear in the search results. The blue link in Google SERPs is the ‘Title Tag’, and the black text under that is the meta description.

So if it is the first thing that robots see, it’s surely the most important starting point for a page? Yes it is, and it is important not to have long titles, and descriptions stuffed with key target phrases. But because it’s just the starting point, and there are some easy set rules to follow, it’s important not to spend hours working out the right density and positioning of the information.

By always focusing on just 2 or 3 main key words for a page, it’ll be easy to work out the meta. Like this post for example, we have decided to have an inventive page title that doesn’t really say a lot to the engines. ‘Don’t let meta get stuck on the brain’. Google will only really see the words meta and brain, which no one in their right mind will search for. But by having the right amount of information in the landing page text, and having secondary titles and header keywords in place, we can still target certain phrases like ‘meta importance’.

The job is made much easier when using a platform like Magento, WordPress or Joomla, as you can have tags applied to pages and posts, making it easy to give the page a noticeable theme.

Quite often we don’t even apply meta descriptions to a blog post, we just leave the page set in a way which allows the search engines to choose a chunk of text from the body of the page. Oh and don’t forget- Google doesn’t see meta keywords or give them any weighting at all. Add them, but these are only beneficial to the other search engines like Bing and Yahoo.

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