Meta Tags – Superstars of SEO and Traffic

It’s a universal SEO truth that meta tags are a vital part of a website’s onsite optimisation.

Humans Love Them, and So Does Google

In terms of driving relevant, convertible traffic to your website, you should never underestimate the importance of powerful meta tags. They still represent a vital part of the equation by aligning and ranking the right page of your site for the right key phrase, in conjunction with relevant and well-optimised content on the page.

Just as important is their role in increasing click through rates from the SERPs, and that should be enough to make any business owner’s ears prick up!

Your Page’s Elevator Pitch

Meta tags are one place where less is more. Just like the famous ‘elevator pitch’, you need to distil the essence of your business into just one sentence – so make sure that you spend a lot of time creating metas with your best salesmanship.

In fact, search engines only see a certain amount of characters, so if you go beyond those parameters they’ll be cut off and won’t have a chance to make any impact. Ouch.

‘Concise, compelling and precise’ – how’s that for an ‘elevator pitch’ for how to write effective meta tags? It’s not bad, if we do say so ourselves, but a real example may demonstrate this a little better:

<meta name=”title” content=”Wildlife Conservation With Gap Africa Projects”/>

<meta name=”description” content=”Interested in working with animals in Africa? Our wildlife conservation projects offer great opportunities to work with animals and assist in wildlife conservation.“/>

 <meta name=”keywords” content=” wildlife conservation, working with animals, work with animals”/>

Setting aside all the techno-geek HTML coding, the essence of these meta tags we wrote for our client is just the sort of thing Google loves in order to drive the right targeted traffic to that page of their site (and their impressive conversion rates prove it!).

They’re clear, compelling, and they tell Google exactly what’s in the tin: what they do, where they do it, and how they’re relevant to a suite of well-researched and targeted search terms for which the page is optimised.

I actually think Shaun Anderson from Hobo-Web sums up the process in a pretty neat little pitch:

“Your tags should be accurate, relevant and descriptive, but don’t think ‘meta tags’ until you have thought ‘topic’ and ‘user experience”.

While content is most certainly king, meta tags are hard-working superstars in their own right.

Hand Crafting Metas vs Coding Metas

One of the main problems most of our clients suffer from is lack of time and, if they have hundreds of pages on their site, then hand crafting and writing the meta tags for each page of the site is often very time consuming.

This is where things go wrong for SEO because they often hand this task over to the developers, who just write an automated script.

And the problem with scripts is that they are generally not SEO friendly; they often sound terrible and clumsy; they do not have enough salesmanship; and, as a result, they don’t help your pages rank and don’t help drive good traffic to your site.

Need Help with your Meta Tags?

If you are struggling to compose inspiring, compelling and SEO friendly meta tags for all the pages of your site, give us a call.  We have a huge team of writers with an unparalleled expertise in writing meta tags that can help you get more traffic to your site.