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Think of these tags as your way to help influence how you define the topic of an individual webpage. Meta tags and title tags are critical to assist with search engine rankings, to the SEO (search engine optimization) industry. Meta tags contain information about a website.

Understanding Search Engine Results

The site returns ten (10) results and each result entry has 3 sections: when you go to a site such as Google and perform a search for a keyword phrase,

Title of the page (title tag) 1.

Description (meta description or snippet of text) 2.

Destination URL (address of the webpage) 3.

We'll group them under meta tags but for purposes of illustration, title tags are technically a different tag, Let's review how meta tags and title can influence search engine results.

What are meta tags?

There are three types of meta tags that a SEO expert will focus on: most commonly,

Title tags 1.

Meta description 2.

Meta keyword 3.

Tip: To review meta tags for a page type "Ctrl + u" when your Internet browser window is open (Firefox only).

Title Tags:

But descriptive and try to keep the title tag under 100 characters or 10-12 words, as a best practice be specific. There is a character limit on how much text a search engine will read. " This text is the title tag and it help identifies to the search engines what your page is about. Entertainment and Video News, weather, world, . U.S, you'll see the text "CNN.com - Breaking News. Visit CNN.com and look in the top left hand corner, for example. Title tags are the words seen on the top left hand corner of your internet browser.

Meta Description Tags:

The 1-2 lines of text under the title of a page in a search engine can be influenced by the meta description tag. What is significant about the meta description tag is the potential opportunity to influence how your page appears in a search engine. So most descriptions are limited to 1-2 sentences, search engines can only read about 255 characters. The meta description is a text statement that gives an abstract about what the page is about.

The first text phrase on the PDF will act as a substitute for a meta description tag. Focus on the first visible text available, to influence the text in a search engine result. Tip: PDF's do not have meta descriptions.

Meta Keyword Tags:

Meta keyword tags should be less than 500 characters. The meta keyword tag is an opportunity to highlight and reinforce important of keyword phrases. What keywords are important within your page's content?

The Role of Keyword Research:

The webpage's content and keyword research play a role in guiding the SEO professional towards what information should be included within meta tags on a given page. This information is useful to incorporate these keyword phrases into the webpage's content. An SEO professional conducts keyword research to get a magnitude of what keywords are popular among search engine users.

Creating Meta Tags Onsite or Outsource?

The more benefit you will find consulting with an SEO firm, the more competitive the industry. Do you currently rank in the top 30 results (pages 1-3) in a search engine for a keyword phrase you think a customer would type in, as a benchmark? Time constraints and budget will influence the decision to perform keyword research and create meta tags in-house or to outsource to a professional search engine optimization agency, depending on your industry.

The result will be a circular process that leverages descriptive on page content to help identify to the search engines what your site is about. The process is completed with the creation of meta tags and title tags as a compliment to the on page content. Modifying the webpage's content by incorporating popular keyword phrases will help improve the page's ability to rank for a given keyword phrase. Followed by implementation of keyword phrases into existing content, many search engine optimization agencies recommend conducting in depth keyword research.