We love the web how-to: 1. Keywords and metatags
If you aren't a techie, the myriad detail of web stuff can be intimidating. So we're putting together a series of 'bitesize' how-to's explaining things that we find are puzzling our clients. This is the first.
Keywords and metatagsClients have started to give us keywords these days to help with search engine positioning, but what we're seeing is that most don't understand the best way to do this: so here's the 2 minute guide to the subject.Typically, our clients have been sending us keywords as a big block of words, separated by commas, to do with the client's business. That's a great start, but it's only about half the story.On most web pages, there's a bit you can't see that is used by search engines to help work out what that page is about. This stuff is called 'Metadata' (which means 'information about information' or just 'summary' in plain English). There are two common 'tags' for Metadata on most web pages:
- Keywords: 35 words or short phrases summarising the page (up to 255 characters to be precise). For the We Love The Web home page for example, that might be 'We Love The Web, bespoke web development, eCommerce websites, Content Management System' etc.
- Description: A short paragraph summarising the page
So: how do you get maximum value from metatags?
Keywords are really about the page, not the website. A list of generally relevant keywords about the business is likely to be generally helpful in search-engine terms, mainly because your pages are likely to contain those words in the bits of text that you can see. It's not getting you maximum value in search engine terms though.
Alternatively, if you have a topic you'd like to see us cover, then ask away.
