Following on from our Introduction to Search Engine Optimisation last month, this month we’re starting to discuss the practicalities of the ‘What to do with your website code’ part of our series. This week, we’ll be concentrating on meta data.

What’s meta data?
First things first, for those of you that haven’t fiddled too much with your websites – what is meta data? Also known as meta tags or meta elements, meta data is website code that explains what your website is all about – particularly to search engines and people accessing your site from them.

Let’s take a look at the result you get if you search Google for Daily.co.uk:

Google returns, in response to any query, information drawn from two key meta elements for the websites it returns. “Daily Domain name registration and web hosting from Daily.co.uk” is what we have in our Title tag, and “Reliable and fast domain name registration with free website builder including .com and .co.uk domain names. Register your domain names today with Daily.” forms the contents of our meta Description.

How meta Title and Description tags are relevant to potential visitors
When you look at it that way, it’s pretty obvious that you should make sure that your Title and Description tags contain a succinct, relevant, and enticing summary of what your website is all about. You want people who see your site on their Google search to understand immediately who you are and what you do, and to feel encouraged to click the link and visit your site.

Secondly, do you have more than one page on your website? Well, then, you’ll need to make sure that each one has individual Title and Description tags that best reflect the content of the page. Remember that all the time, search engines like Google, Yahoo! or MSN are sifting through millions of web pages to find the most relevant matches for any search – if there’s useful information on your website, the chances are that they will direct searchers directly to the page containing that information, not to your homepage.

Here’s what happens if Google decides that a what a searcher really wants is somewhere they can find a decent reseller web hosting package:

Totally different from our general results, you’ll notice. If someone specifically searches for reseller web hosting, we want to tell them how great our reseller accounts are, give them an idea of what they include, and tell ‘em where to find these great accounts. These potential customers are after specifics about reseller hosting, not generalisations about our company, so we make it easy for them to see that we’ve got the information they’re after. Do the same across every page on your website and you’ll increase the chances of people who search on terms which are relevant to your website actually clicking the link and becoming visitors.

How Title and Description tags are important for SEO
That takes care of the humans who might come across your Title and Description tags. But SEO is about search engine bots, so there’s a few other angles to consider to make sure that search engines return your site in response to relevant searches.

Firstly, everything above works brilliantly for bots as well as humans – search engines aren’t particularly fond of repeated content in general and prefer to see that meta elements relate well to the actual page content. But there are few more technical things you need to consider in order to truly optimise your meta tags for search engines.

1. Be honest about page content
Just as you won’t impress a human visitor with overly grand claims, you’re not going to convince a search engine that your site is a useful, relevant and easy-to-use resource for potential visitors if your Title and Description bear only a passing relevance to your page content. Keep it short, snappy, and accurate.

2. Include relevant keywords – and use them wisely
You’ll see that in the above examples, the keywords I searched on were bolded in the results, drawing the human eye to the fact that this result fits perfectly with the search. At the background level, the same thing happened with the search engine – it looked at millions of possible web pages and found that this one had relevant information.

To make this work in your favour, you need to decide what the most important keywords are for each page of your website (we’ll cover keyword research in more depth in a future article) and make sure that they are in both your page content and your Title and Description tags. Choose just one or two keywords or phrases per page, and put them as close to the front of the tag as you can without sacrificing readability. Search engines consider the top of the page and the left-most area of a title or heading to be the most important and so attach more weight to it when deciding what pages to return in response to search queries.

3. Keep it consistent
Develop a style for your title tags and stick to it. One good trick is to start with your brand name before discussing the specifics of that particular web page. You’ll get the benefit of a consistent format plus you’ll increase brand awareness – and the more people see your brand name, the more relevant and trusted it will appear.

4. Keep it short and sweet
Search engines will only display a certain number of characters, so if you try to make the contents of your Title and Description tags too lengthy you’ll just be wasting your time as your carefully crafted content will be replaced by a … after a certain length. Much better to write something that presents the honest facts as briefly and enticingly as possible. If you offer a free trial of a product, for example, use your description to encourage your visitors to give it a whirl.

The Keywords Meta Tag
The Keywords tag is a widely discussed topic in the SEO community, since it’s the one that in the past has been most open to abuse by unscrupulous website owners stuffing common-but-not-necessarily-relevant search terms in just to try to show up on as many search results as possible. As a result, the major search engines have put in a lot of work to make sure that a) this practice does not benefit those who try it and b) the Keywords tag carries less weight than other meta data in terms of search engine ranking.

It’s still open to discussion how far the keywords you add to this tag influence search engines, though it’s generally agreed that some search engines place more importance on them than others. However you look at it, there’s really only one guideline to follow:

Keep it relevant
For effective SEO, this should be your battle cry with every aspect of website design and copywriting, and the Keywords tag is no different. You don’t need hundreds of keywords, just a few well-chosen, targeted words and phrases which accurately reflect both page content and likely search terms. Don’t repeat every possible relevant keyword across every possible webpage – split them out and use them where they most reflect the page content. And don’t, for the love of sanity, indulge in the decidedly suspect tactic of adding keywords which you think will be commonly searched for but which have no relevance to your website – you won’t fool the search engines any more than you’d impress a human visitor with such tactics.