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Make meta keywords and meta description tags

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And what's in fact a meta keywords tag?

It's a special tag that's supposed to be like a brief list of your page's most important topics. Normally, using these special meta tags, you make a list of the most valuable keywords on your site. These words're called meta keywords.

Making meta keywords tags, you ease the robots' job — telling them where to look. And, though Search Engines themselves do not think too much of meta keywords, they still help your SEO efforts a lot, for instance when you submit your site to directories (we'll do this in the next chapter, Chapter 4: Getting on the move: where your link building starts). In brief, meta keywords tags just help non-human visitors (and believe me, these are not only Search Engines' robots) concentrate on the most important things.

Here's a real-life parallel. Say, I'm thinking of buying a Cadillac Escalade, and a dealer gave me a brochure. Though I'm mostly interested in the engine power and volume, fuel consumption and CO2 emission, to find it, I'll have to look through the whole thing. And, if they'd put what I need at the very first page, it'd save me a lot of time.

And, if I were a robot, and the brochure a web page, I'd love those technical things put into a meta tag.

In fact, meta keywords aren't that terribly important, still they can make your rankings somewhat higher. So come on, make a meta keywords tag for your landing page.

Here's how this tag looks like:
<meta name="keywords" content="keywords,keyword,keyword phrase,etc.">

No human being will see this list on your web page, as it's just a message to the Search Engine's crawler.

Here's an example of how a meta tag might look for http://www.weddingchannel.com
<meta name="keywords" content="wedding, weddings, wedding gifts, wedding ideas, wedding cards, wedding flowers, wedding Australia">

Now, meta description tag. This kind of tag is used to give a brief description of your site. What you see below the links on Search Engines' results pages is quite often the site's meta description.

A page's meta description
A page's meta description displayed in Google

Here's how the tag for meta description looks like:
<meta name="description" content="Brief description of the contents of your page.">

There are two basic things meta description should be made for:
Firstly, for Search Engines' robots it makes use of good keywords and looks attractive.
Secondly, real people read a meta description, and they decide if they want to click a link and go to leave some money on your site.

So here's what you need to do: stuff your meta description with keywords, though reasonably, and make it look like an irresistible invitation to your web page.

Want some examples? Here's where guys have done a good job:

Example of a well-optimized meta description

Example of a well-optimized meta description

Example of a well-optimized meta description

Here's an example of how a description can be written:

<meta name="description" content="Get fantastic wedding ideas, best wedding gifts, nice cards, all kinds of wedding flowers and any wedding accessories for weddings all over Australia.">

Now look what the report says about keywords density and description length. For your site, make it as close to what's recommended in WebSite Auditor, as possible. And, like you did with the page title, make meta keywords and description tags available online.

image_with_report
Advice for writing meta keywords and meta description of your page

DO IT NOW! Write meta keywords and meta description tags and upload the changed pages to your web server.

17 comments

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2009-02-04 13:33:21: Laus Sorensen

Working with this is really funny and interesting, because I can almost immediately see the result. BUT i would like to be able to refresh the report results from within the report page - now I need to go to the keywords tab, refresh from there, go back to the reports tab and then choose the page I came from.
Could be easier.

Answer
2009-02-06 06:24:30: Dan Richmond

@Laus Sorensen

Laus, thanks a lot for posting this idea. I passed it to the developers but honestly I'm not sure that it'll be possible soon - there are certain technical problems. Anyway, we'll see what can be done.

Thanks for keeping in touch!

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2009-09-15 05:23:24: Gary Hunter

Dan, im confused as on website auditor my competion have a keyword density on my desired keywords of 0% this means if I put my keyword in the title iwhich i assume the search engines like it brings up a red square on auditor....surely this is wrong and i should have my keywords in the title and description?

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2009-09-16 11:10:00: Dan Richmond

@Gary Hunter

I assume your competitors are optimizing for other words, and the fact that they rank in top 10 for your keyword is a coincidence. If these sites are topically related to yours you can look at their keywords - probably they would be more effective for you too.

Anyway, I suggest that you write to Link-Assistant.Com's support and send them your WebSite Auditor project or at least the URL and the words you are optimizing for - they will look closer into your case.

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2009-09-25 10:13:57: anna negrean

Does a meta keywords tag need to have the exact words found in the text of the webpage it belongs to?

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2009-09-29 11:33:45: Dan Richmond

@ Anna Negrean

Not necessarily. You can use synonyms and variations, but it does help having the keywords in the body as well. And recently there was an official confirmation from Google saying that meta keywords are not counted as a ranking factor. They still work on some search engines, so it's still a viable idea to have them but they don't affect your Google rankings any more.

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2009-12-15 03:01:13: Ken Taylor

Wow! Website Auditor came back with a bunch of recommendations.

One thing I like about the report, at least in my case, I made the same mistake for each of my KW descriptions. The report made it so easy to fix since I just need to wash, rinse, and repeat.

I think the best part of the "Meta Description" report is the "Competitors' Meta Description." How easy can it get? Going through the ten competitors' descriptions gave me some great ideas that I could use for mine.

I like to whip out my word processing application and start writing some various takes. I get to...

move the KW to a better prominence
adjust the number of words to match the ideal amount (length)
make the description "action inticing"

Amazing! This is only 3.6. Looks like their will be a lot more ways to boost optimizing to come :)

Answer
2009-12-23 21:41:33: Tim Inglis

Hi all.

I'm just curious. Do you use the same keywords (in the meta tag) for each page, or do you have to go through this process for each page individually? And what about the description meta tag? Is it describing the page, or the entire site?

I'm still using the free trial of the SEO PowerSuite at the moment, but I'm hoping that we can take advantage of the Christmas special. At that point, I'll be able to make full use of the software and do some optimisation on some real life guinea pigs, so to speak.

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2009-12-28 11:51:41: Dan Richmond

@Tim Inglis

No, same keywords in meta tags will quite often qualify as duplicate content. Meta description describes what you see wise to describe. Normally meta descriptions are different for different pages. But they do not have too much weight now anyway.

Answer
2010-01-01 19:24:54: Ken Taylor

Just an update: I've gone from 25% to 40% with the info this Practice SEO has presented so far.

I think the results should be higher because I'm having a little trouble viewing the results of new changes I've published from an updated website. In particular the meta description. As an example, I changed the number of words but it's not reflected in WA after I rebuild. I wonder how much time is needed between publishing the updated site and then rebuilding in WA. I'm guessing this may vary with ISP's, connections and a host of other cyber-variables.

I've also submitted this question to the Link-assistant support.

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2010-01-03 10:06:29: Paul Watchorn

Hi Dan,
Well it was all very interesting up the point when you said they dont have too much weight now anyway.Are we talking about the keywords in meta tags, the descriptions or both?

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2010-01-05 09:49:37: Dan Richmond

@Ken Taylor

Ken, please make sure that all your changes appear online and that your new keywords are really there (it's possible that something went wrong with the upload of changes).

After that, in WebSite Auditor you need to go to the Keywords tab and click the button Rebuild to rebuild the project. After that, you can switch to the Report tab and view the new analysis.

That's how it works.

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2010-01-12 10:04:12: Dan Richmond

@Paul Watchorn

About meta keywords and meta descriptions: Google officially said back in September 2009 that they have no SEO value. They also claim that they are using meta description "sometimes" as a snippet in search results. My comments: 1) Google is not the only search engine out there, and there's no confirmation that all the rest of SEs do or do not use meta KWs and descriptions. 2) Strangely enough, I still see my (or clients') web pages going up in Google for some keywords as soon as those are added into the meta keywords tag ;) So the only thing that is confirmed: they don't do any harm. The other thing is, some SEOs can observe that meta keywords tags are still working even on Google. I'm still adding them to all pages.

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2010-09-02 12:15:03: Make Money at Home

Is it wrong to put one long keywords two times in meta description tags.

Thanks

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2010-12-02 19:04:32: Lilian Ivanov

hello Dan.
I am a little confused about 2 things.
i have 4 keyphrases on 1 page to optimise. So, according to the repport, less competitive is the keyword - more good optimisation have me and my competitors. And more competitive are the keywords - less optimised are all our pages. Bud i think is logik that wher is more competition - the pages are more optimised.

And second thing:
in 1 of my keywords (the most competitive) i have this situation of competitor optimisation:
1. 47%
2. 17% !!!!
3. 56%
4. 34%
I look at the links to that site. about 1700, but 99% with anchor like "click here". So When i optimising my page - what level page optimisation must i take? 47% or 56% or else?
Thanks alote

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