eComm Tips

One area that I find a lot of people still have questions on after we cover it is the meta tags. I’m not going to talk about the title today, just the meta keywords and the meta description.

Meta tags are one of the standard onsite search engine optimization (SEO) things that you should be doing for your site. Here are some guidelines to follow:

Meta Keywords
Honestly, the meta keywords are just not as important as they used to be. Back in the day when search engines were just getting started, meta tags were considered to be very important. In programming a website, the meta tags were sort of like a ‘label’ that a search engine would crawl to know what a site was about. But do to abuse many of the search engines don’t care as much about them any more.

So, here’s the way that I do meta keywords. First of all I want you to know that I don’t do the meta keywords until after I have written the content for the rest of the page. You’re going to be getting your list of keywords from the actual content of the page, and that’s hard to do if you don’t have any content!

Next, once you have written the content of the page to the point where you feel good about it, go back through the content and any time a word or small phrase jumps out at you as something important write it down. This is your list of meta keywords.

A few things to be careful of: don’t repeat phrases. Also be careful not to repeat and one word too much either. At most I’d only repeat a particular word twice. Really, when it comes to meta keywords less is more. You don’t need to go crazy with these. Just keep it simple.

Meta Description
Simply put, the meta description is just a brief description of that page. It only needs to be about 20-25 words long, so again nothing too crazy long here. The reason that the meta description is important is because many of the search engines will use it as the result description. If not, they’ll pull the first paragraph from the page. It just depends on the search engine.

Those are the basic guideline for meta tags. Keep in mind, your meta tags need to be unique for every page of the website. Don’t just write them once and copy them to every page. Take the time to make them different for every page. And remember, this is one of the last things that you do for the website before you start to advertise it.

I hope this was helpful! Feel free to leave comments below if you need me to clarify anything.