Essential Meta for your Website

Be thankful that you didn't have to build websites back when it was a spam of keywords battle for receiving good search results. It made for ugly websites and in my opinion, created some of the first pop-up spam as well.

It's much easier to double your business by doubling your conversion rate than by doubling your traffic.

Jeff Eisenberg

Back then your content also was not weighed or regarded in your search ranking. The more you could spam the same keyword the higher you got. But today the conversion of what you are looking for and who ranks higher actually has some synchronicity with each other. Google doesn't want the highest results of searches not actually containing relevant content to the intent of your search.

What this all means for people building websites is that they need to do a bit more work. You have to pour yourself into keyword data. Find what words are being searched and where you can use them where they matter.

TITLE TAG:
Title tags are displayed on search engine results pages (SERPs) as a clickable link. They are important because they will convey information directly to searchers letting them know what the intent of that page might be. One of the important factors here is the width of title and/or character count. In Google's case, the Title that shows on their SERP pages is a maximum of 600 pixels which is approximately the 92 character count most people give. You can surely go over the suggested amount, but if you do, maybe you should be seriously considering what you are trying to convey in one title. Just like most marketing ideas, try and keep it simple and concise. There are tools online where you can test our your titles to see how they would display on these SERP pages.

Moz Title Tag Preview Tool
Smart Search Marketing Tool

META DESCRIPTION:
A meta description is an HTML attribute that can be input into every page and is recognized by most people as that small paragraph seen under clickable links on search engine results pages (SERPs). They are short paragraphs that should accurately describe the content of the link the searcher would be clicking on. No two pages should have the same description as all your content on each page is unique.

You can make a meta description any length you like, but SERP pages will shorten that to fit on their pages consistently. The recommendation is to keep your descriptions between 50 - 300 characters but to be sure that you use some valuable keywords in your paragraph that are in line with what people would search for and are thinking when looking for that particular content.

Google has relayed to us that neither meta descriptions or keywords are used in their ranking algorithms. The key here is that they do help your click-through-rate (CTR) and that is huge. Its always going to be important to be at the top of SERPs, but if no one ever clicks on you it may not matter. CTR will help your ranking in the end.

Portent SERP Preview Tool
Smart Search Marketing Tool

Try to ask people you know that aren't related to your industry what words come to mind when they think of your business. Who knows, they might surprise you and you might find some new words that people are searching. Until then, use the tools online that can tell you what people are searching for.