Meta Tags & Getting the Basics Right

We have been making ongoing improvements to our website service to give you greater control over your website in respect of search engines and now you can edit the Meta Tags for each web page and each job description page on your recruitment website.

What are Meta Tags?

Meta Tags are the hidden code which is inserted into a web page. When you view a web page, the Meta Tags are not visible to the eye, but it is possible to view the source code if you wish to see the hidden tags behind the scenes.

In respect of SEO, when people refer to the Meta Tags they are usually referring to the Meta Title, the Meta Description tag and the Meta Keywords tag.

Nowadays, the Meta Keywords tag is not considered to be very important.

Although Meta Tags are not directly visible on a web page, they can influence how your web page looks on the Search Engine Results Pages (these search results are often called the SERPs).

QuickontheNet.com Summary

For each page and each job description page, concentrate your efforts on your Meta Titles and your Meta Descriptions, and not your Meta Keywords.

As you write your Meta Tags, try not to let your text overflow and spill out of the boxes we provide, as per the screen shot below.

In your website toolkit, at the bottom of each page and each gallery item (each job page), there is a place for you to enter Meta Tags text for SEO purposes, as per the screenshot below:

The History of Meta Tags

Meta tags were originally created to help search engines find out important information about your page that they might have had difficulty determining otherwise. For example, related keywords or a description of the page itself.

Many people incorrectly believe that good Meta Tags are all that is needed to achieve good listings in the search engines. Although Meta Tags are normally always part of a well optimised page, they are not the be all and end all of optimising your pages.

In the early days of the web, people were able to get great listings from optimising just their Meta Tags, but the increasing competition for good search engine listings eventually led to many people spamming the search engines with keyword stuffed Meta Tags. The result is that the engines have changed what they look at when they rank a web page.

Invisible Code

Meta Tags are invisible on a website because they are hidden within the programming code. Meta tags are not regarded as the only issue when it comes to SEO, but they should not be ignored and it is important to consider them in your search engine planning. Now let’s look at your:

• Meta Titles (these are the blue titles on Google).
• Meta Descriptions (these are often used as the short snippet paragraphs on Google).
• Meta Keywords (these are not displayed on Google).

IMPORTANT: Meta Title (or Page Title or Title Tag)

These are the blue titles (blue headings) on the Google search results.

These are perhaps the single most important element to achieving good SEO. Your Meta Titles are considered to be the fuel for search engines. With this in mind, if you place the right mix of keyword phrases in your Meta Titles, they can be picked by search engines.

Meta Title: Tip Summary

• Use brief, but descriptive titles.
• Use between 50-80 characters including letter spaces.
• To put it another way, up to 10 words (2 or 3 keyword phrases).
• It is best not to repeat any keyword more than once.
• You do not have to use perfectly formed sentences.

According to Microsoft, it is recommended that your title tag (or meta title or page title) is 50-80 characters in total length, including letter spaces. In other words, keep it to around 6-10 words per page title.

IMPORTANT: Meta Description

These are often used as the short snippet paragraphs on the Google search results.

Your Meta Description is a mini-description of your web page and it should be written plain English.

As quoted by Google: Description meta tags are important because Google might use them as snippets for your pages. Note that we say "might" because Google may choose to use a relevant section of your page's visible text if it does a good job of matching up with a user's query.

Meta Description: Tip Summary

• Up to 250 characters including letter spaces.
• This can be considered to be a mini-description of your web page.
• Use the keyword phrases which have already been used on your web page (this is your ‘Main text’).
• We believe you should only use the same keyword once, or twice maximum.
• Use good English, but keep it brief and punchy.
• Imagine you are sending an SMS text message to a friend to describe a web page. That text is roughly the right amount of text to use in a Meta Description.

This information in grey shading is not important...

LESS IMPORTANT: Meta Keywords

Nowadays most SEO experts believe it is best not to use Meta Keywords. There is mixed opinion on this, but we would certainly recommend you do not overload your Meta Keywords on any web page.

Based on experience, we have found the best results are achieved by not using any Meta Keywords.

These are the keywords you would expect people to use to find your website on a search engine. It is recommended that in total, your Meta Keywords do not exceed 1024 characters, including letter spaces.

Do not have more letter spaces than you need to.

e.g. Accountancy Recruitment Agency, Accountancy Recruitment, Agency, Accountancy, Recruitment Agency, Accountancy Jobs,

It is important to make sure that the keywords used in your meta keywords also appear on your page text.

Make sure your meta keywords are relevant to the overall theme of your web page and avoid using words which are not relevant to your page, even if they are very popular in the search engine world.

Meta Keywords: Tip Summary

• Include plurals.
• Combine 2 or 3 words to use the same short keyword phrases.
• Within phrases, do not repeat any single keyword more than 5 times across your entire collection of meta keywords.
• Use comma separated text.
• Include geographic locations, if appropriate, including countries and/or cities.
• If you know a common misspelling of a popular keyword, then consider including this in your keywords.
• If you know an alternative American English versus UK English spelling of a popular keyword, then consider including this in your selection e.g. ‘color’ versus ‘colour’.
• Have up to 1024 characters, including letter spaces.

How to Create your Meta Keywords
For speed and efficiency, the quickest way to create your Meta Keywords is as follows:

• Copy and paste your page text into Microsoft Word.
• Then, delete and strip out the non-keywords (delete words like ‘on’, ‘the’, ‘and’).
• Separate your keyword phrases with commas.
• At the end of the exercise, you should have a collection of comma separated keyword phrases, along with individual comma separated keywords.
• Delete any words which appear more than 5 times (keep the 5 most important variations).
• Do a ‘word count’, to make sure it is not longer than 1024 characters.

The Google Search Result Looks Different
Sometimes the search result can look different for the same page and the result can vary depending on the keywords used to perform the search.

If you find that the Google search result for a particular page does not show your Meta Title and your Meta Description, that would normally indicate that either Google believes the wording you have used in your meta tags is not an accurate reflection of the page content, or the searched words were not prominent in your Meta Tags.

This is not a cause for great concern. When this happens, Google will automatically grab some text from your web page content and use different text instead on the search results.

Getting it Wrong

• As recommended by Google, create content primarily for your users and not for search engines.
• Avoid inserting numerous unnecessary keywords aimed at search engines, which can be annoying or nonsensical to users.
• Avoid having blocks of text like "frequent misspellings used to reach this page" that add little value for users.
• Avoid hiding text from users, with the intention of displaying it to search engines e.g. having white text on a white background.

A General Note of Caution

• We believe it is best not to over-do the SEO treatment of your website.
• In particular, Google tends not to like it if you are trying to gain an unfair advantage on the search engines.
• Therefore it is best you keep your URLs and Meta Tags totally relevant to the page content.
• If you believe the Google search engine performance for a web page has worsened and not improved as a result of your SEO efforts, then that indicates that particular page has been automatically penalised and pushed back by the Google algorithm, possibly because Google believes the page is “keyword stuffed”, meaning it is overloaded with keywords and Google believes the page is trying to gain an unfair advantage. The raising and lowering of your page ranking can happen automatically, as a result of the Google algorithm and the way it sorts/ranks billions of different web pages.

How Often Does Google Change the Search Results
The Google search results are always in a state of change and the results can change every day, and even several times a day. As for your own website, Google and the other search engines will normally catch up with the changes and updates to your web pages every 1 or 2 months.

Therefore, any changes and updates you make today could be fed through to the search results anytime within 2 months (normally within a couple of weeks).

If It Ain't Broke, Don't Fix It
Please note that websites at QuickontheNet.com can often perform very well on the search engines quite naturally, without any SEO treatment. Search engines like web pages to presented in an honest and accurate manner and it is believed they do not favour websites which have been over-optimised. Also please note that sometimes websites (we mean any websites, not just QuickontheNet websites) which have never had any special SEO treatment can perform quite well on the search engines.

There is no need for you to take any action as a result of this information. In particular, if you know your website is already doing very well on the search engines, then there is no need to do anything new.

Summary
Once again, we recommend you concentrate your efforts on your Meta Titles and your Meta Descriptions, and not your Meta Keywords.

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