Meta Tag SEO: Here’s How To Optimize Each Element With A Keyword Phrase

Doing meta tag SEO is the most fundamental task content producers can do to boost a page or article’s chances of showing up higher in search engine results pages. On-page SEO is one of those “low hanging fruit” opportunities that every marketer should take advantage of. By consistently optimizing every web page and blog post element available in your Content Management System (CMS), more of your domain’s content will show up higher in search results for greater visibility.

After doing keyword phrase research and choosing a term or topic of interest, use it in the web page tags that are available for maximum optimization. Here are the meta tag elements of every web page or blog post that benefit from consistent search engine optimization application.

• Page Title
• Page Meta Description
• H1 (Headline)
• H2 (Subheading)
• Alt Text

Now that you know which ones contribute to your SEO efforts, let’s go over them in greater detail, and give you guidance on using your chosen keyword phrase properly for all tags.

Meta Tag Specifics For SEO

Page Title Tag – One of the most important web page/blog post tags you can use your chosen keyword phrase in is this tag. It’s the blue, clickable line that shows up in search results. If you want the entire tag to show up in search results without being cut off, limit the tag to 65 – 70 characters. In search results, it looks like this:

Best practices for writing consistent title tags is to use either the pipe (|) or the dash (-) to separate your chosen keyword phrase from the rest of the title tag to help the search engine crawlers understand it. It’s perfectly fine to use both as demonstrated above.

If your company has a specific geographical area for supporting customers, use that information in your title tag as well. Again, if you look at the tag above, there is a geographical limit in there. Also, notice how the business name is in the title tag as well. Google encourages businesses to use SEO to promote your branding, so be sure to include your business name in some of your title tags.

Page Meta Description Tag – The page meta description tag is not a ranking factor, but if you put some effort into writing well-crafted descriptions that can include features, benefits, calls to action and geographical information – or some combination – you can increase the page or post click through rate (CTR) because what you’ve written appeals to web searchers. The more people who click on your results, the more visits and visitors are captured in your analytics, and more page views are generated.

Your page meta description is the black or dark text underneath the green URL in search results. The meta description is limited to about 150 characters, or a little more than half of the characters for the title tag. If you have an empty page meta tag description, Google will take a snippet from that page or post, and insert it into the description section in search results. In addition, Google may replace the description you’ve written with content from the page. If you find this happens often, continue to write variations of the tag until you see it published consistently in search results.

H1 Tag (Headline) – Separate from the page title tag, the H1 is like a newspaper headline you can optimize with a chosen keyword phrase. You’ll create one before the first paragraph of every article or post you write and publish. You should only include one optimized H1 tag for each page or post you create.

Here’s an example:

Another great example is for this post you’re reading – the H1 tag is “Meta Tag SEO: Here’s How To Optimize Each Element With A Keyword Phrase.”

H2 Tag (Subheading) – This is an overlooked tag that most web owners don’t know about and almost never use, but since every little bit helps, add an H2 tag or two in your website content. Subheading tags are great for breaking up long blocks of text or to introduce a new idea within the content. In the visual example above, the text directly below the H1 tag is an H2 (Hyper-realistic 3-D Rendering Sell Your Products With Vivid Imagery).

The H2 tag for this post is “Meta Tag Specifics For SEO.”

Alt Text Tag – Another incredibly useful web page tag that lets you insert your keyword phrase, topic, or a similar word in image properties. If for some reason, your image doesn’t show up on the web page or post, the information you put in this tag lets web readers know what the image is about. Populate the tag to get your images, pictures, and illustrations to show up in search engine image results.

Now that you know how to use each tag, pick a few of your pages and articles or posts, and apply keyword phrase optimization to each tag for the content and see how this improves its visibility in search engine results.

If you are struggling with updating the meta tags on your landing pages or blog posts, or simply don’t have the time, contact the SEO professionals at Kraus Marketing today!