Norton’s Top Tips on Meta Tagging! (No, there are no sexual connotations there Stu!)

Norton Legg — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 14:59:51 +0000

Dear fans of the Bloom Media Blog
Very recently, my esteemed and reliable SEO comrades subjected me to the worst possible SEO torture in the SEO world, a torture so horrible that the Sicilian Mafia may even consider using it for their own dark purposes, or possibly it may even feature as a critical part of the plot in a future “The Godfather 5”!?
Yes, it was in fact writing a unique set of Title, Meta Description and Meta Keywords tags for a grand total of 600 pages! Fortunately, a kind hearted soul called Naz (a new member of our team) heroically rode to the rescue and helped me out with some of the work.
Anyway, I’ve been keeping an eye on the Bloom Blog and decided that I had had enough of looking at Stu’s profile picture with him trying desperately hard to look like the hero D’Artagnon from the Three Musketeers and somehow not quite able to pull it off. Is it something to do with the Recycled Student haircut, eh Stu??

Stu

Have I just spotted Stu’s alter ego??

I’ve decided to give you readers out there some help when it comes to writing your Title and Meta tags for each page. I have compiled a list below on the sort of things you need to bear in mind when writing them.

Firstly, to introduce to you what Meta tags actually are; they are contained in the section of a web page. The section contains all the information for a page including Title, Description, Authored by, CCS Templates and Javascript commands.

Norton’s 5 Golden Rules of Meta Tagging

Golden Rule 1) Keep it unique & relevant – there are a great many websites out there that simply duplicate their Title and Meta tags across all their pages in the belief that this is an unimportant aspect of their site. Nothing could be further from the truth! The content of these tags can be instrumental on what level of clickthrough rate your site will receive; these tags need to be unique and relevant to the page they are featured on.

Golden Rule 2) Keep it short and sweet – think of the search engines in a human capacity, they don’t want to be inundated with reams of text, they want something brief and to the point which will tell them “at a glance” what that page will be about.

Golden Rule 3) Remember the brand! - A great (and costs nothing) way of promoting your brand as part of a wider online marketing strategy is to include your website (or indeed your company name) in the Title tag of each page. This helps to promote brand awareness for when your rankings really begin to kick-in.

Golden Rule 4) Get your keywords in – If you’re populating the Title and Meta tags of a category page, say “Car Insurance”, ensure that this keyword is featured once in the Title tag, once (or even twice) in the Meta Description and once in the Meta Keywords tag. DON’T spam the Meta keywords tag with repeated instances of the same keyphrase, it’s counter-productive and doesn’t provide any value in this way.

Golden Rule 5) Advertise! – If your keyphrase rankings are doing well, why not feature a promotion or special offer that you’re running? It’s a completely free way of promoting your site and offers out there resulting in a great way of attracting a higher clickthrough rate. Your Return on Investment (ROI) could be so much higher!

So there you have it! The secret to writing good, informative Meta tags a secret no longer! If any of you readers have any cunning ideas on how I can plot my revenge against my colleagues, please leave a comment!

Bloom Blog» meta tags

Norton’s Top Tips on Meta Tagging! (No, there are no sexual connotations there Stu!)