Building a Meta Website

Meta-tags. A word that will make any search engine optimisation officer stand to attention and your average Joe peer around in confusion. What are meta-tags?

Meta-tags are a few lines of code inserted in the beginning a web page, invisible to users but vital to having your website found by search engines. Meta-tags supply information to search engines such as the name of your website, what your website is about (description) and what keywords are associated with your website.

There are other tags that can also be used but for the purpose of this post, we will be focusing on Keywords and Descriptions.

Description
A page’s description meta-tag gives search a summary of what the page is about. This may be a phrase or even a sentence or two, but the current standard is for no more than 30 words. It’s usually a good idea to incorporate your city and country in your description as it can help people in your area find you.
Search engines such as Google also uses descriptions as snippets for your pages when delivering search engine results. Words in the snippet are bolded when they match what the user is searching for, so it can underscore the importance of your website.
Search engine optimisation specialists also recommend each page of your website has its own unique description. Having a different description meta-tag for each page helps both users and search engines, especially when searches results may bring up multiple pages of your website.

Keywords
Keywords are up to 1000 characters long and are the words that you want your website to found by. Unless these words are repeated in the website text they are not very useful but they can also help you define what your website is about.
For instance, if you had a page about stamp collecting – AND you say the words “stamp collecting” at various places in your body copy – then mentioning the words “stamp collecting” in the meta keywords tag will help boost your page a bit higher for those words.
Remember, if you don’t use the words “stamp collecting” on the page at all, then just adding them to the meta keywords tag is extremely unlikely to help the page do well for the term. The text in the meta-keywords tag works in conjunction with the text in your body copy.

Examples:
Bob has a website that sells CDs and MP3s of his band, the Fighting Tulips. They are a progressive country jazz quartet that specialises in wedding entertainment. Their gigs are primarily in the Swan Valley in Western Australia.

With these facts, we can write a description like this:
Fighting Tulips are a progressive country jazz quartet that is a popular wedding entertainer act in the Swan Valley in Western Australia.

The keywords might look something like this:
Fighting Tulips, Swan Valley, Western Australia, progressive country jazz quartet, wedding entertainment, fighting tulips music, swan valley wedding singers

The web developer will then add the following code to the website:
<meta tag= “description” content=” Fighting Tulips are a progressive country jazz quartet that is a popular wedding entertainer act in the Swan Valley in Western Australia. ” />
<meta tag= “keywords” content=” Fighting Tulips, Swan Valley, Western Australia, progressive country jazz quartet, wedding entertainment, fighting tulips music, swan valley wedding singers ” />

Meta-tags are not the be-all and end-all of search engine optimisation, but their importance in the ever increasingly important battle for the target audience is not to be underestimated.