The first key is properly using meta tags. Meta tags can be a big help to your search ranking, but if used improperly can actually hurt your rankings. There are two tags to work with here, three if you count the title tag, which for all intensive purposes I will include because it’s in the same place.

Getting started
Lets take look at what these tags do and then see how to use them to our advantage.

The title tag is of course the title of the page and gets displayed in the top of the browser, but is also something search engines tend to use as the title of your search result as well. So if all your titles are the same it’s not going to help you or the people searching your site if you don’t have customized titles.

My recommendation here is to have unique titles on every page. But how to accomplish that goal if you have 400+ pages, that’s a lot of manual entry. There are two techniques we use on campus.

The first is if your site is in the CMS you are already done for the most part. In Collage we load the description of the assets in your site automatically into the title of the page. If you notice that pages on your site don’t have titles it’s probably because you don’t have descriptions. Once you add them you’re done for this part.

If your site isn’t in Collage this is a little bit harder as you’ll have to manually go through each page and set the proper title, but trust me it’s worth it. Think about how you search, if the title of the result isn’t what you were looking for you don’t click on it 90% of the time, so making quality title will help people find your site and hopefully what they were looking for.

Keywords
The second piece of the puzzle is the Keywords meta tag. Some search engines (read: Google does not) use these to categorize where your page should show up when people search. the real key here is to have a few specific words directly associated with the content of the page. Most engines have a limit on how much information they’ll allow you to have in this section, so being concise is going to help you get the most out of your key words.

The recommendation here is to keep your list of words to less than 10. as a page really shouldn’t have more topics than that any way.

Description
This one’s pretty straight forward; the description is simply a small paragraph of information about the page, a summary if you will. Most search engines (read: except Google) use this to display the content underneath your link on the results page. So it’s important that you put relevant content here so that people will be more tempted to click on your link.

wrapping up
So while it might look like meta tags are useless because Google doesn’t use them, remember Google only has 64% market share in the search game, and in different situations Google does pick up on these tags so having the best set of clean and concise metatags will only help you in your quest of gaining position in your market.

Next time I’ll talk about the king of SEO your Content and how making smart choices in laying out your content will do more for you then anything else. So until next time clean up those metatags!