Jacob Tyler Creative Group | News, Events, and Press

10.22.05 - Some Basic Client FAQ's about Meta Tags

As an interactive San Diego web design agency and as a San Diego graphic design firm, many of our clients ask how to get the best use out of keywords and meta tags related to their business. For example, as we have written in the content above you can see that even though we serve a national client base, we have to focus locally when starting with keywords used within content and meta tags. Rather than just saying "corporate identity", we say "San Diego corporate identity" as our research shows that when potential customers search Google and other search engines, they typically narrow their search locally. This applies for meta tags and meta description keywords as well. The information below will answer some basic questions about meta tags and keywords for you to get the best out of your search engine optimization strategy.

What are Meta Tags?
They are information inserted into the "head" area of your web pages. Other than the title tag (explained below), information in the head area of your web pages is not seen by those viewing your pages in browsers. Instead, meta information in this area is used to communicate information that a human visitor may not be concerned with. Meta tags, for example, can tell a browser what "character set" to use or whether a web page has self-rated itself in terms of adult content.

How do I impliment Meta Tags?
Meta tags are easy to impliment. Open your homepage in some sort of HTML editor, or even notepad will do. Here are two common types of meta tags, then we'll discuss exactly how they are used in more depth:

-head-
     -title-This is my Title (i.e., Jacob Tyler Creative Group | News, Events, and Press)
           -meta Name="description" content="sample description (JTCG is a full service San Diego graphic design firm and San Diego web design company) "-
          -meta Name="keywords" content="Keyword, Sample Keyword, Keyword 3, More Keywords (san diego, advertising, advertising agency, graphic design, web design, advertising agencies)"-
-/head-

In the example above, you can see the beginning of the page's "head" area as noted by the HEAD tag -- it ends at the portion shown as /HEAD. Meta tags go in between the "opening" and "closing" HEAD tags. Shown in the example is a TITLE tag, then a META DESCRIPTION tag, then a META KEYWORDS tag. Let's talk about what these do.

How do I use the Title Tag?
The HTML title tag isn't really a meta tag, but it's worth discussing in relation to them. Whatever text you place in the title tag (between the TITLE and /TITLE portions as shown in the example) will appear in the reverse bar of someone's browser when they view the web page. For instance, within the title tag of this page that you are reading is this text: "Jacob Tyler Creative Group | News, Events, and Press". We use this as the title for your listing.

How do I use the Meta Description Tag?
The meta description tag allows you to influence the description of your page in the crawlers (like JTCG for example) that support the tag.

Look back at the example of a meta tag. See the first meta tag shown, the one that says "name=description"? That's the meta description tag. The text you want to be shown as your description goes between the quotation marks after the "content=" portion of the tag (generally, 200 to 250 characters may be indexed, though only a smaller portion of this amount may be displayed).

In review, it is worthwhile to use the meta description tag for your pages, not just for us, but because it gives you some degree of control with various other crawlers. An easy way to do this often is to take the first sentence or two of body copy from your web page and use that for the meta description content.

How do I use the Meta Keyword Tag?
So to use the meta keywords tag... look back at the opening example. See the second meta tag shown, the one that says "name=keywords"? That's the meta keywords tag. The keywords you want associated with your page go between the quotation marks after the "content=" portion of the tag. It is said that you should include up to 25 words or phrases, with each word or phrase separated by commas.

Let's say you have a page about art work, and you've written your page using "artwork" as a single word. You realize that some people may instead search for "artwork," with "art work" in their searches being two separate words. If you listed these words separately in your meta keywords tag, THEN MAYBE FOR THE FEW CRAWLERS THAT SUPPORT IT, your page might rank better for "art work". Sadly, the best way to ensure this would be to write your pages using both "artwork" and "art work" in the text -- or perhaps on some of your pages, use the single word version and on others, the two word version.

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