Why Do You Need Meta Tags?
Along with SEO content writing, Meta Tags and keywords are two of the most important elements of your website. Without professionally written Meta Tags and good keyword research you greatly reduce your chance of ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPS).
Meta Tags help search engines index your website correctly. If you’re a plumber – your Meta Tags should reflect that, so when someone searches for a plumber – your site is indexed as a plumber’s website.
If you don’t write your own Meta Tags, Google and other search engines just cobble together their own, which might not showcase your business in the best light. Many business owners ignore their Meta Tags, which lowers their chance of attracting potential customers to their websites.
What Do Meta Tags Do?
There are two Meta Tags – the Title Tag and the Meta Description.
Title Tags
Title Tags are extremely important for your SEO marketing strategy. This is the link phrase or statement that you see for each result in the SERPS. When you click this link – you are taken to the website for that person or business.
It is also the text that you see in the tab above the web address in your browser, when you open a web page. And when seen in browser tabs – Title Tags are free advertising for your website. If you look at the tab at top of your browser – you’ll see that my Title Tag for this page is ‘Maximising SEO with Effective Meta Tags‘.
The problem is that if you don’t write your own Title Tags – the search engines will select the first line of the content on your website – which may not be the best way to advertise your brand.
Did you know that many people will click a website link in a results page, based simply on whether the Title Tag is interesting or matches their search query?
So your Title Tag needs to be written expertly – so that it not only describes your products and services correctly – but also entices visitors to your website.
Title Tags can only be approximately 70 characters in length or less (including spaces) but ideally they should be 50 to 60 characters – and you need a different title tag for every page and post on your website!
So by making sure that your Title Tags are written professionally, using specific keywords, you are one step closer to increased traffic, sales and conversions!
Meta Descriptions
A Meta Description is the text below the Title Tags in the search engine results pages. This is where you need to engage searchers, attract their attention and get them to click on the link to your website.
Whilst the Title Tag may be sufficient for some searchers to click onto your website – others may need more information to make that decision, which is why you need an optimised Meta Description.
So your Meta Description needs to be informative and engaging. It must give the viewer a good reason to click on the link and land on your website. The problem is that in general, the Meta Description has a max of 160 characters (including spaces) – any longer and the search engine omits the remainder, which doesn’t look very professional. So it must be written well and written concisely.
If you don’t write your own Meta Descriptions – the search engine will conjure up a description based on the content of the page it indexed. And this description may not be the best way to market your brand.
Benefits of Title Tag and Meta Descriptions
- Engage and inform potential customers.
- Entice searchers to your website.
- Increase traffic and conversions.
- Generate leads.
- Act as free advertising in a searcher’s browser.
Why Do You Need Keywords?
Whenever someone types a query into a search engine, Google searches through all of the relevant websites and decides which ones fits the searcher’s query the best. It does this by looking at the content of your website and matching it to the searcher’s query.
You really want your website to be ranked on the first page of Google, because most people don’t bother looking at page 2 or 3. So you need to make sure that you’re using the same search terms in your content that people type into search engines.
These search terms are called keywords and you need to include as many of these keywords in your content, Meta Tags and Meta Descriptions as is reasonable. It’s these keywords that help to convince search engines to present your website to a searcher’s query; the better your content matches a searcher’s query, the higher your rankings (there is more to ranking than just keywords – but you get my drift).
Common Problems With Keywords
The first and most glaring problems with keywords is that many business owners don’t even bother with them. They just think that their products or services will stand by themselves. In some cases, you might be right, but optimising your content with keywords is vital for the vast majority of websites and is essential for SEO.
There are three common mistakes people make with their keywords:
- Using keywords that people don’t actually type into the search engines.
- Using keywords that are too competitive.
- Not knowing which keywords are used by your target audience.
If you ask a web designer to optimise your website or you ask a professional copywriter to write your content or blogs, one of the first questions they ask you is what are the keywords you want to rank for on your website?
Knowing how to research keywords for your website and which keywords to select is a big part of optimising your website for the search engines.
Trying to rank for highly competitive keywords is all well and good, but you might be more successful ranking for less competitive and lower volume keywords first.
This builds up momentum and ranking for lots of low volume, low competition keywords can be just as lucrative as some of the higher competition keywords. of course, what you really want are low competition, high volume keywords, but depending on your industry, these are not always easy to find.
FYI: Just making a guess about your keywords isn’t going to help your SEO.
If you want a quote for copywriting or would like to chat about your project, feel free to contact Stack Copywriting Services.