Look for Meta Tag Problems

It happened again. I just approved a new website listing on MadisonClick.com and saw something kind of strange. It's something you should look for when hiring a website design company. (Also see my Meta Tag Keywords post)

I think this website is actually a competitor of ours (they seem to do website design on the side or something), but what they've done is put 67 (I counted them) keywords in their keyword meta tags. Not only is that way too many but they are single words, not multi-word keywords (key phrases). So with this logic, they're hoping to rank well for words like: club, door, dry, fleet, box, digital, etc. There are a number of problems here, let me explain.

First, there are way too many keywords. Anywhere from 5-30 is the maximum amount of keywords you should have. It's much better to stick to a lower number on that scale than to go all the way up to 30. In reality, there is no technical maximum but you don't want to look spammy. On a home page, I'd pick 15 good keywords. On the inside pages, put 5 to a maximum of 10 per page.

Second, the keywords chosen are poor. You want to use longer tail keyword phrases instead of single keywords. Why? Think about it. When you go to Google and are looking for something, how often do you type in one word? Hardly ever I would guess. People know now that typing in a single word is going to get them millions of results and it won't be what they're looking for. People know to enter in several words to help refine their search. So why in the world would you list one word keywords in your meta tags? Go longer tail, like 2-4 words per keyword phrase.

What keywords should you use? What are the best keywords?

That's where the value of good keyword research comes in. It would take me a long time to explain what that is but I've touched on it in previous posts and we're not going to give away all of what we do but this information is out there if you really want to know. The right keywords make a huge difference.

There's really a lot that goes into SEO. If the website design company you've chosen is being lazy with picking meta tags, then I can tell you you're missing out because they're more than likely not doing a good job with the rest of your website SEO. On site meta tags are pretty basic. So look at your site and look at the website of the company that made your website (go to the "view source" function in your web browser to see them). If it's anything like I've described here about there being way too many and the words being irrelevant, then you'll know the quality of your SEO.

Contact Webstix for SEO help.

-Tony

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