Professional and Creative Website Designer in France

Writing Meta Tags for Websites

How to write good Metatags

Q. What are metatags?

Metatags (or meta tags) are pieces of html code built into a web page that tell search engines what the website is about. Your choice of metatags will influence how your site is described in a search engine and how highly it appears for different search terms. That said, they are only one of several factors, not a magic solution to appearing top. The 3 most important meta tags for search engines are Title, Description and Keywords.

If your website is in English and French or other languages, it's also important to add a language metatag.

The 3 metatags, with an example of how to write them for an artist's website in France and their recommended lengths, are:

Title: 3-15 words long and appears in bold in search results. It also appears at the very top of the screen when someone views a page. Each page can have a different title and it's a good idea if it does. Words should either not be repeated or be repeated once only ("artist" and "artists" for example would not count as a repetition) and it should be rich in keywords (The title, plus links going to a page are the most important things from a search engine's perspective in determining how high your page will appear in search results). It's best if each word in the title appears once or more in the text of the page.

Description: 15-30 words long and appears under the title in search results.
The Description metatag's primary purpose is that it compels someone reading it to click it - by succinctly describing your page in an interesting &/or informative fashion.

To save time, similar pages can have the same description, or you can create a unique one for each page. Google doesn't use the Description metatag to determine where your site will be placed in its search results, but it does display it so visitors know what the page is about. Some other search engines do use the description to determine how your page ranks, so it should therefore contain the most important keywords.

Search engines sometimes opt to display part of the text on the page instead of the Description, but the Description is the norm.

Keywords: 20-45 words long. Does not appear in search results, so should be written purely from the point of view of optimizing it for search engines. This is a series of comma separated words or short phrases, e.g. "portrait painter, portraits, France, France artist, France portrait, painter, female, art, art in France ...'

For the most important keywords, 1 Website Designer uses a piece of software that tells us how often to repeat a keyword, as it varies by search term, however as a general guideline, do not repeat any phrase, but repeat each word 3 times. (so do not include e.g. "France artist" more than once, but you could put "France, artist, France artist, artist in France", ...

It's worth mentioning that search engines also look at the titles and keywords that each page links to - so it's worth including e.g. "artist" in the keywords of every page, even if some pages don't use that keyword in the text.

Language metatag: If your website is all in one language (e.g. English), then the main search engines will easily be able to identify which language it is in and therefore this metatag is not necessary. If however you have a website in two or more languages (e.g. French and English) it's best to include the appropriate tag on each page, so that search engines know which pages are in which language. Full information on using the language metatag.

As part of our search engine optimization process, which is included as standard in the design of all new websites, you have the option of letting us write the metatags for you, however you may prefer to write them yourselves (or at least write the Title and Description) yourself, as these are visible to potential customers as they appear in search results.

Finally, if you're creating your own website and are not sure how to enter the meta tags into your html code, they should go just below the <HEAD> tag and look something like this:

<HEAD>
<TITLE>The title of your website</TITLE>
<meta name="keywords" content="a list, of keywords, separated, by commas">
<meta name="description" content="A description written as a normal sentence">

Free Tools / Info: Google PageRank- Directory Submission - Creating Quality Links - Writing Metatags
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