Google tool for meta-tag research

Are you interested in getting your website or blog perfectly optimised for the Google search engine?

Well one of the first things you need to get right are your meta-tags. Meta-tags are pieces of text that are hidden in the HTML behind each page on your website. Meta-tags are used describe the information that is on each webpage.

Meta-tags are important for several reasons.

Some search engines rank your web pages based on the information in your meta-tags. The more accurate and refine the meta-tags are, the more chance you have of ranking high in Google
The text stored within the meta-tag is used by many search engines in your search results. Think of it as the textual “preview” of your website’s content that appears on the search results page of Google.
Meta-tags allow you to target certain keywords

The most common issue I see with website meta-tags, is that the meta-tags are not individually set for each individual page on the website. I’ve seen websites and blogs with thousands of pages, each page using exactly the same meta-tags. It’s not rocket science to work out that by tweaking the meta-tags to suit the content of each of these individual webpages, your ‘reach’ in Google could be far greater.

So how do you check how Google is currently indexing your meta-tags? It’s easy, simply type go to Google.com (or your local version of Google) and type:

site:www.yoursite.com

For example, for my test blog sneakydevil.com I typed site:www.sneakydevil.com . Here’s an example of the results that appeared for Sneaky Devil.

Sneaky Devil meta tag listing in Google

You will notice several aspects (some good, some bad) in the screenshot above that will contribute to SEO.

Firstly, the meta-tag description text (the black ‘description’ text under each page heading) is the same for most of the individual pages, which is not ideal at all for SEO.

Secondly, the URLs are not considered Search Engine Friendly. If you look at the URL underneath the black description text, you will notice that the URL is not something that you could not remember easily, nor would it make sense to you if it was written on a blank piece of paper with no accompanying information. URLs must be a short, concise representation of what is contained within each page. This helps not only the search engines interpret what is contained on a webpage, but just as importantly, humans!

Thirdly, the page titles. Again a failing of many websites our there is to have the same Page Title hard-coded for every single page within the website. The page title is represented in the above screenshot, by the large blue Title text. In this specific case, the page titles for Sneaky Devil are considered optimised, however the home page title could do with a little bit of work due to the unconventional method of writing one long string of words separated only by full stops. Think of search engines being like your grade 4 english teach - strict and conventional. Google is programmed to interpret ‘natural’ language, so anything which deviates too much from your standard words and sentences may be misinterpreted by Google.

Go try out the site:www.yoursite.com command in Google now. You’ll be surprised what you find as you trawl through the results. Stay tuned, soon I will show you how to update and fine-tune your meta-tags so that your website is one step closer to SEO bliss.

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