Optimizing Meta Tags

Meta tags were originally created to help search engines find out important information about your page that they might have had difficulty determining otherwise. For example, related keywords or a description of the page itself.

There are two meta tags that can help your search engine listings - meta keywords & meta description.

Tag limits:

• Recommend that your Keywords Meta not exceed 1024 characters including spaces.
• Recommend that your Description Meta tag not exceed 250 characters including spaces.

Meta description tips:

• Make sure you accurately describe the content of your page while trying to entice visitors to click on your listing.
• Include 3-4 of your most important keyword phrases. Especially those used in your title tag and page content.
• Try to have your most important keywords appear at the beginning of your description. This often brings better results, and will help avoid having any search engine cut off your keywords if they limit the length of your description.

Meta keywords tips:

• You should only use those keyword phrases that you also used in the content of your page, title tag, meta description, and other tags. Any keywords phrases that you use that do not appear in your other tags or page content are likely to not have enough prominence to help your listings for that phrase.
• Don't forget plurals. For example, a site might have both "recommendation" and "recommendations" in their keyword meta tag to make sure they show up in both searches.
• Watch out for repeats! You want to include your most important phrases, but when doing so it can be difficult not to repeat one word many times. For example, "site recommendation" and "site recommendations" are two different phrases, but the word "site" appears twice. This is okay to do in order to make sure you get the phrases you need in there, but be careful not to repeat any one word excessively. There in no actual limit, but we recommend that no one word be repeated in the keyword meta more than 5 times.
• If your site has content of interest to a specific geographic location be sure to include the actual location in your keyword meta.

Search engine marketing - resources

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