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My SEO Answers - Meta Data

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Today I'll show you what the heck "Meta Data" is. I'm sure you've all heard this term used a thousand times but a lot of you don't really know what it is specifically. It deals with title tags (or page titles), meta descriptions (or page descriptions), meta keywords, H1, H2, H3 tags, Alt tags. Any inbound marketing firm will bring these up and you should know what they mean...happy viewing.

Video Transcript

Hey, everybody. My name is Jim Mueller. Welcome to another episode of SEO Answers. Question of the day is what on earth is meta data? Specifically what are title tags, meta descriptions and meta keywords? So, we’ll start with title tags.

Where do you find title tags? Well, you find them at the top of the browser and I’m using Firefox here for Mac. So they’re right here in the middle, inbound marketing, SEO consulting, internet marketing firm, SEO contents. So those are the title tags for my website, for ReignNet.

Let’s see what they look like in Safari. Basically, they look the same. I also did a screenshot for Internet Explorer because that’s what most people are using and the title tag shows up in the blue bar at the top right there. Now, where else does it show up? Well, it shows up in the search engine results so if we do a search for inbound marketing consultants, here’s ReignNet’s site. And then here’s my title tag. So all these blue bold lines here are title tags. Okay?

Now, why is a title tag important? Well it’s important for several reasons. One is it basically describes what your webpage is about not only for the visitor but for the search engine. In terms of Google, they have about 197 attributes that go into determining who’s going to show up where in the search results. Title tags weigh very heavily on where you’re going to show up in the search results. In addition to that, if somebody does a search and they come to this page, this is the first thing they see is your title tags. So this needs to be something that’s going to match what they were searching for and catch their attention. So you’re competing for the clicks here.

Next, meta descriptions. So, a meta description is this sentence that appears right below the title tags. Now, Google only shows about 160 characters. Your sentence and meta description can be longer than that but Google is only going to show about 160 characters. And this meta description, again, is a sentence that describes what your page is about but it should also be compelling and try to drive some action by the visitor because remember, you’re competing here for clicks and just because ReignNet shows up number two for this search result doesn’t mean somebody is going to click on that. Somebody might read something down here that catches their eye and that meta description causes them to click on that result instead of mine. So, it’s very important to write a crisp clear meta description.

Last is the meta tags. Now, meta tags are basically a laundry list of the keywords that you’ve identified. In our last episode, we talked about keyword analysis and research so at all the keywords that you analyzed and then came up with a final list to write your title tags which are also referred to as page titles by the way. And then we wrote our meta description and then lastly, the meta keywords.

Again, it’s just kind of a laundry list of all the phrases that you would like to be found for in Google that best describe what that page is about and those are not seen on your website or in the search results. They’re just kind of in the background. Only Google sees them. I should tell you though that meta keywords are becoming less and less a factor in terms of where you’re going to show up in the search results. Even Google has alluded to this.

So – but my personal belief is you’ve done the work to identify the phrases. You’re already in there putting in your title tags and your meta descriptions. You might as well load your meta keywords in there. I figure if you get just a little benefit from it, it’s definitely worth the time. So, anyway, that’s meta data. Thanks for checking in and I’ll see you next time.