SEO insider tips week 3 - Meta data and duplicate meta data

Meta data has always played an important role in Search Engine Optimisation. However, a lot of people will tell you that it is no longer as important as it once was, this is mainly because of spammers filling their meta data to capacity and causing "real" websites with validly high rankings to be negatively effected, giving search engine users a poor search experience. And that is the key here, search engines are not interested in elevating your website to the top of their rankings rather, they are 100% focused on giving the searcher / customer / user the best results i.e. the most relevant results for their search. Therefore once spammers started to force their sites into the top positions, the search engines developed new ways to find the best and most relevant search results, reducing the importance of meta data.

Despite this search engines still use meta data to find out about your pages and weigh how relevant the page's content is to the meta data. Therefore it is critical to match your content to your meta data and this is where the word "unique" comes in. Search engines like to find unique content on every page they visit and because of this they like unique meta data. If you are using the same mata data across your website, you need to change that now!

To view your meta data, go to your website and right click on each page and select "view source". This displays the source code of your website. Search the page for the following:

<title>
<meta name="Keywords" content="
<meta name="Description" content="

The page title is probably the most important piece of infomation as far as the search engines are concerned, so make sure you are giving highly relevant, keyword rich page titles to every single page on your website. Next come the keywords, again ensure that you have chosen keywords that are relevant to the content of the page. Finally you need to come up with a relevant, unique and keyword rich page description. This is important for two reasons. Firstly, search engines often use the meta description as the introductory snippet within their search results pages, so make sure it is descriptive and enticing. Secondly descriptions are important because they are yet another way the search engines use to establish relevancy.

So we leave you with the following words:

• unique
• relevant
• keyword rich

Evaluate your meta data using each of these words.