Head and meta tag optimization

Written by Mark Frasher
Posted April 30, 2009 at 5:17 pm

Getting your head and meta tag optimization done right is key to your websites success. Period.

You know that stuff on the top of your pages filled with all kinds of wierd terminology like “meta robots, description, keywords, etc…”? Well, this is the section of your webpage that the search engines will scan to basically learn what your webpage is about. If you don’t optimize your head and meta sections you are asking the SERPs to bypass your webpage and send it into oblivion!

I’ve seen so many different so called “experts” talk about the best way to optimize their webpages. So many different methods, so many different blowhards that will leave you wasting your time and wondering, “why isn’t my page being found”? Well, I’m not going to claim to be an expert, but I will claim that my webpages get found. So you decide…

Using your Title tag:

Your Page Title appears at the very top of a browser window. Most humans never actually see the title after they arrive on your page! This is because they tend to first look at the headline of a page, not at the top of the browser’s window. Search engines, such as Google and Yahoo, give special emphasis to these words when they rank websites for relevance and when they return their search results to searchers, they display your Page Title, exactly the way you write it, as a link to your page.

Must Do’s:

Your keyword should appear in your title tag - ONLY ONCE
Use your keyword in a sentence if you can. Make your title natural.

Using the Meta Keyords tag:

Search Engines use them to help determine relevance of the website to the topic. Back in the day, this tag was very important, but recently, it has less significance. But it is still significant!

Must Do’s:

Your webpage’s specific keyword must appear as the first keyword.
Keep your keywords to a maximum of 5.
After the page’s specific keyword, use variations of the keyword for the next 4.
Keep your keyword phrases to 3 or less words.
Never use the same keyword twice in the meta keyword tag.

Using the Meta Description tag:

This is basically an advertisment for your site. When found in the search engines, this para-phrased portion of your site will be shown to the searcher. Because of this, it needs to be ‘catchy’ and grab the readers attention. Otherwise they won’t visit your site.

Must Do’s:

Use your web page’s specific keyword in the description - ONLY ONCE.
Don’t simply repeat the title.
Make it attractive - would you click on it?

Your page’s file name:

www.internetmarketingpursuits.com/internetmarketingphilosophy.html is much easier to read as opposed to something that ends with /php.2x?3f right? Which would you click on? Making your page URL/file name SEO friendly is also very important.

Must Do’s:

Use your web page’s specific keyword in the file name- ONLY ONCE.
Try to hyphenate the file name if you can; eg: /example-file-name.html

Your page’s robots tag:

The meta robots tag was created initially to allow page authors to prevent page indexing. Over the years, various search engines have added additional support to the tag.

Search engines will index any page they find. But you can put code here to tell them to index your page:

There’s also a form you can use that adds the command “follow,” which tells the search engines to index your page and also follow any links they find on that page to other pages, which they can then index. It looks like thi

Personally, I use the following on most of my sites because I want the SERPS to follow all links and index the pages.

Using the following will tell the spiders not to index your page:

Using the following will tell the spiders not to follow links on your page:

Hopefully this gave you a basic understanding of the head and meta tag optimization. Remember, following these few simple steps will go a long way towards getting your webpage found by the search engines. In my next post, I’m going to cover image alt tag optimization.

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