DIY SEO Health Check-up
In this article we will use the umbrella term ‘meta tags’ to also include the ‘title tag’. Although this is a misnomer, it happens to be how people describe these tags, so in order to stay comprehensible we will follow said naming convention.
Firstly, what are meta tags? Simply they are HTML tags which go in the ‘head’ region of an HTML document. Think of this as the ‘brain’ of the web page (contents in the head region are not visible on the actual website, it is just data). It stores all of the CSS, JavaScript, other special information and namely what we are interested in: meta tags.
In order of importance there are three meta tags which we are interested in: Title, Description and Keywords.
One could say that the most potent and influential thing you can do with a web page is to have a title tag which contains in it the right and properly balanced keywords. Out of all the text and data on your page it is the one that Google looks to most for the description of your page’s content and subsequent ranking for searches.
But this is not new news. Even by dabblers in SEO it is commonly known that one must have a ‘good title’ tag on for his pages. Be that as it may it is still poorly implemented and due to its overwhelming importance deserves discussion here.
Title Tag Don’ts
There are many wrong ways to do your title tags so let’s take a moment and itemize them as incorrectly done title tags have a large impact on your web page’s search engine ranking and may even result in penalization.
1) Too many kewords/Spammy. Remember to keep ALL text on your website (be it text in your meta tags or otherwise) natural. If it feels or looks weird then you have ‘Over-SEO’d’ it.
2) Too long. Keep it under 70 characters.
3) Choose keywords which represent specifically the content on that page itself. Keep it relevant to the content of that page.
4) Duplicate title tags. Keep title tags unique and descriptive. Don’t just put your company name as the title tag for every page on your website.
Part Two:
We will continue to explore other meta tags and then describe how to find all of them on your website and determine if they poorly done or not done at all! It happens more often than you’d think!
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