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Is it a fruit? A nickname for your avatar girlfriend? A really complicated computer term?

Guess again!

Metadata is simply “data about data.” In the SEO world, it’s condensed data that helps search engines understand the data on webpages so that they can categorize and index them appropriately—helping you and me find what we’re looking for on the web. There are three primary metadata tags to optimize in the head section of your webpage HTML:  the page title, description, and keywords attributes.

Page Title

Go to Google.com in another tab/window. Type the keyword phrase “content marketing agency” into the search box. You’ll see that the webpage that got the number-one position on the search engine results page (SERP) has “Content Marketing Solutions For Your Business | Content Marketing Agency” as its page title (in blue). (And guess who it is! IdeaLaunch!) Google places rather significant importance on the webpage title tag; make sure you follow these tips when crafting one:

• Use primary keywords that the landing page is optimized for. There should be content on the page that features these keywords.
• Check to be sure the keywords have a high search volume (we use the Google AdWords Keyword Tool) so that they will apply to a high number of searchers.
• Phrase your title in a way that will make a person want to click on it.
• Use initial caps so it looks like an official title.
• You only have space for roughly 64 characters (including spaces) in your page title, so choose your words wisely!

Page Description

Entice searchers to click on your website with the page description. This is where you get to have a little fun and exercise your copy-writing muscles. The description should describe what’s on the landing page in an engaging way—its intended use is more for humans than it is for search engines, confirming the page’s relevancy with the searcher’s query.

• To increase click-through rate (CTR), use keywords in your description. You’ll see that Google bolds keyword matches in the title and description copy.
• Write unique descriptions for each page on your site.
• Do you change content on your site frequently? Update your page descriptions (and page titles, for that matter) accordingly to reflect the new content. It may take the search engines some time to show the new data on SERPs depending on how often they index your site.
• Descriptions should be about 150 words in length. While 200-250 words will be indexed by the search engine, anything past 150 won’t make it onto the SERP for people to see.

Keywords

The keywords attribute is the red-headed middle stepchild of the metadata family. No one pays much attention to it anymore. Because of widespread abuse (spammers were keyword stuffing in meta tags so search engines readjusted their algorithms), major search engines don’t rank your page according to which/how many keywords are listed in this tag. However, other search engines may use this data for relevancy and SERP placement purposes, so you still want to make sure you fill in the appropriate keywords.

• Choose meta keywords that have high search volume and a competitive PPC price, and be sure to include head and tail keyword phrases.
• Use keyword suggestion tools such as Google AdWords Keyword Tool, WordTracker, and WordVision for ideas.
• Between 10 and 15 keywords are plenty. Make sure they’re relevant to the landing page!

Tags: analytics, carolyn mckibbin, content development, content marketing, search engines, SEO

This entry was posted on Friday, November 6th, 2009 at 3:43 pm and is filed under SEM, SEO, content marketing, optimization, website optimization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.