Search Engine Marketing 101

We get asked about search engine marketing more than any other topic. While there are no magic bullets, let's start with some search engine basics - MetaTags.

Metatags are placed at the top of the source code of a web page, and provide information about a page which guides search engines to categorieze your page correctly.

Let's look at the the 3 tags we talk about all the time.

The Title Tag

While not a true meta tag, the title tag is often treated like a MetaTag. This tag is crucial for search engines and one of the top 10 factors in how search engines rank your page.

Your title tag will be the tag that is displayed in the search results on google. Your title tag is also used as the name of the bookmark and is the text that shows up in the title bar of the browser above the <back> <forward> arrows.

Your title tag should be short, descriptive, and contain key words about your page. We typically recommend a title tag to have both your brand name and the name of the page. (Title tags should be 4-7 words long)

The Description Tag

The description tag should provides a concise explanation of a webpages content. The description is often (but not always) displayed on the search engine results page and can impact click through rates.

This description tag is your chance to "sell" the page. Make it relevant to searchers and to the page content. Ideally the description should be 200 characters or less. Just like the title tag, you should not use the same description tag on every page.

The Keyword Tag

The keyword tag at one time provided search engines with the "keywords" of your website. Unfortunately due to unscrupulouse webmasters, false keywords have often been embedded in this metatag, and the keyword tag is no longer used by many search engines. (The keyword tag has little to no impact on Google, however there is some suggestion that Yahoo still uses the keyword in it's rankings)

If you need assistance or would like to talk about your metatags, please feel free to comment below, send an email, or call our office.