[Rx] Basic SEO | How to Write Simple Meta Tags

tagThere was a Kevin Costner movie where he kept on hearing, “Build it and they will come.”

Great for Kevin, not so good for webpages. If you want to be found on the net, you need more… SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

 

BASIC SEO | How to Write Simple Meta Tags

People have written books and there are 550M links to the topic. Search engines like Google have magic formulas for picking out which sites are listed first on whatever someone types into the search engine.

If you’re using WordPress, Yoast is a top SEO plug-in. Their site has some good articles.

NetoTraffic has a good description of the meta tags. According to them, there are less than a handful of useful metas for Google.

All these tags go into the <head> section of your html. If you’re using a WP plug-in, it should insert where need. If you’re doing it by hand, this is an example for this page:

Title Tag

Right after all the other metas.

<title>Basic SEO | How to Write Simple Meta Tags</title>

The “|” is called a pipe and you’re supposed to use it instead of commas. Some sites say you should put the company after the title like Basic SEO | DevelopRx. The magic number is suppose to be under 55 characters. The title is also supposed to have targeted keywords for the page.

Description Tag

The meta tags are up near the top of the <head>.

<meta name=”description” content=”Simple description of 
Meta Tags with HTML examples.”>

The description is supposed to be under 155 characters, no double quotes, keywords, and differently worded than your content.

Robots Tag

This tells the search engine if it should include your page or not. The default is to include it. Things can get a little screwed up if you accidently use the noindex tag. This will essentially make your webpage invisible.

<meta name=”robots” content=”index”>

index – allow search engines to index the page (default).

noindex – don’t allow search engines to index (show) the page.

follow – tells search engines to follow the links and index them.

nofollow – tells the search engines not follow any links on page.

H1 Tag Title

H1 are usually used for the title of a post/page. You can think of this as an extension of the Title Tag.

<h1>[Rx] Basic SEO | How to Write Simple Meta Tags</h1>

Other Tags

There are a few other tags like keywords and canonical that might add some value too.

Build it, add good tags, and they will come.

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