4. Optimize Your Website Tags
4. Optimize Your Website Tags
- Title Tag – Most important
- Meta Description Tag
- Meta Keywords Tag
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In order to optimize your website tags, you will need some sort of access to edit your site. If you have a website builder program, look for access to your tags as one of the options. If you created your own site, you can simply edit the code of your site. If you have no access at all, you can request that your website designer make the changes. This is a very important step to getting the most out of your site on the search engines.
If nothing else, you can evaluate the tags on your site to see if it is attractive to the search engines.
How To See Your Tags
- Go to a page of your website.
- Right-click on the page in different areas until you see an option that says “View Source” or “View Page Source.”
- If this does not work, “Source” or “Page Source” should be an option on your view menu.
- The code for the page should open in a new window.
- All the tags should be located in a section of the code that begins with <head? and ends with </head>.
- The main ones to check are:
- <title>
- <meta name=”description” content=”….”
- <meta name=”keywords” content=”…”
- See below for tips on what you hope to see.
Title Tag
Perhaps the most important of all tags, the Title Tag is visible at the very top of the window when you are looking at a web page. The search engines rely heavily on the Title Tag to determine the main topics of a site. This is because it is more or less a spam-proof tag. The Title Tag becomes the headline of the search engine result for that page, so it is important to match it with the content of the page.
Meta Description Tag
The search engines do not rely heavily on the Description Tag to index a page. However, the Description Tag becomes the line or two of text under the headline on a search engine result, so it is a good idea to include text that encourages searchers to click on your site. One of the best ways to do this is to include the terms by which they searched in the tag. Most search engines bold words in the result that match the search terms. This makes it even more important to write a good description tag that includes the key words assigned to that page.
Keywords Tag
A completely hidden tag, this is the one that answers the question I get all the time: “isn’t there a way to include the key words without anyone seeing them?” Yes…but it won’t do you any good. Due to major abuse of this tag, there are virtually no search engines that even read the Keywords tag. However, I recommend that people fill it in with appropriate key word combinations anyway. This is because the effort to do this is usually minimal and there are still some minor search engines that use this tag.
Here are some links to an example of an page that has no optimized tags and one that is well-optimized:
The 12 Things You Can Do To Get Your Website Noticed are the notes from a free course offered by Enter The Net. If you are interested in setting up a free presentation of this workshop please CONTACT ROB. If you want to be informed about upcoming offerings, please join our EMAIL NEWSLETTER LIST. You may leave comments or questions in the space below. We will respond to questions as quickly as possible.