Clients always call this “SEO-ing the meta tags” and that’s a misnomer. Get it right people.
Preface
For the beginners I’m going to cover the basics. For advanced SEO’s I’ll try to add some nuggets that you might not know about.
This guide assumes that you’ve already done keyword research. If you haven’t, I’ll have another post discussing keyword research that you can reference. In the interim, SEMRush and Ahrefs have very good guides on keyword research.
The tags we’re covering include: title, meta description, URL, H1 Tag, and Image Alt tags. There are other tags like x-robots and href lang but we’ll save those for another time. This guide will discuss what you need to understand when optimizing these tags. It will not serve as a how-to for any particular CMS. It will just serve to improve knowledge of these concepts. Refer to your webmaster / dev team when implementing these optimizations.
Title Tag
Here are some general guidelines to follow when optimizing your title tag:
- Normal convention for a title tag is “keyword” | (pipeline) “brand”
- Rule of thumb is 60-70 characters maximum length.
- Avoid truncation – some search engines use a pixel container to decide where tags are truncated. Regularly check your title tags to check for truncation
- Avoid using the same word multiple times
Good Example: (Versatile, Optimized): Black, Brown, and White Shoes | Shoes.footwear
Bad Example: (Keyword Stuffing): Black Shoes, Brown Shoes, White Shoes | Shoes.footwear
Meta Description
Here’s what you should know when optimizing your meta description tag:
- These don’t hold weight in Google’s algorithm. The reasons why we optimize them is to influence Click-through-rate (CTR) on the SERP’s. An optimized meta description will inform the user what the page is about and incentivize them to click. If unedited, Google will pick content from the page to display in the meta description section. This actually happens normally depending on the search used to find a particular page. Therefore, if your page ranks for lots of searches, optimize for the most important ones
- Add your targeted keyword to the meta description just like you did for the title tag. Instead of a phrase, we’re using it in a small paragraph.
- Length should not exceed 160 characters.
- CTAs can influence what draws a click. A CTA is anything that asks the user to take an action on your behalf. “Shop Now” or “schedule a consultation” are basic actionable phrases used for CTAs.
URL
Refers to the actual URL of your targeted page is displayed in search.
- When asked about chaning a url to help a page rank for a specific keyword John Mueller said not to worry about adding keywords to URLs. Still it’s important that your URL properly reflects the context of a page, for the people who work on the site and to clue users who see the plain URL elsewhere on the internet. It also helps for those who actually do look at the URL in search.
Good Example: shoes.footwear/black-tennis-shoes
Bad Example: Shoes.footwear/1234
H1 Heading Tag
Think of the H1 tag as the main headline for your page.
- Should reflect the overall topic of the page.
- This headline is most visible to a user, so it needs to make sense to them
- This is where you can introduce variation for your keywords.
If your page is about shoes, your h1 might be, “Shop our Footwear Collection”.
In regards to H1 Tags, John Mueller said:
“Your site can do perfectly fine with no H1 tags or with five H1 tags”
Cyrus Shepard did a study for Moz to see what the weight of an H1 may be. He did this by running a split test: the control set of pages only had H2’s on the page while the experiment set had it’s H2’s changed to H1’s.
Unfortunately, the results of the test were inconclusive.
Image Alt Tag
For users with disabilities, a screen reader will take image alt text, and voice it to the user. Since, Google doesn’t read images the way humans do, Google relies on the image alt text to understand what the image is and how it relates to the page. Image alt text may hold a small amount of weight for ranking.
- Use descriptive language. If we had an image of a shoe on our page, we would describe:
— Color
— Type of shoe
— Material
— Brand
“Black leather tennis shoe, Footwear Brand”
- Don’t keyword stuff. Remember this is something people with disabilities use.
Advanced On Page Optimization tips
- If you have a very powerful brand, and your products are known by their branded name, experiment with going against convention and optimizing your title as [Brand | Keyword]. Customers who are familiar with your brand may bias towards it. Always set up tests when you go against convention. A basic sequential test to experiment with the idea would include comparing CTR data before and after you make the change. Measure the change in click through rate to this page in Search Console. You’ll know which version is best afterwards.
- When crafting meta descriptions for your pages, look at the top Google ads for your targeted keywords. Ads are designed to have a high CTR. This will uncover value propositions and CTA’s which users are looking for that will aid you when writing your own.
- Mobile SERPs truncate meta descriptions at 120 characters. Check your analytics to see whether desktop or mobile receives the most traffic and optimize length for the winner (mobile will almost always win). If your meta descriptions must be longer than 120 characters, then make sure you put the most important/compelling ideas at the beginning of the description.
- If you’re running conversion rate optimization tests, you should provide headline variations that try to utilize target keywords. If your team wants to go in a different direction, it’s not the end of the world. Just keep an eye on rankings, make annotations in Google Analytics, and measure to see if conversion rate or traffic metrics were affected.
More Resources
End Notes
– Optimizing these things is just the start of SEO. There’s still tons of work to be done.
– While these are best practices, you should experiment and find what works best for your site.
– Reach me on Twitter @JonSaldivar_SEO