Incorporating Keywords in Your Meta Tags and Descriptions

When optimizing your website for search engines, one aspect that often gets overlooked is using keywords in your meta tags and descriptions.

While most people know the importance of incorporating keywords in their website’s content, they don’t always realize that these tiny details in the backend of the website can significantly impact the search ranking.

Think of meta tags and descriptions as the secret ingredients to make your website stand out in search engine results.

In this article, we’ll dive into the world of meta tags and descriptions and explore the best practices for incorporating keywords to help you soar to the top of search engine results.

What are Meta Tags?

Meta tags are HTML elements that provide information about a web page to search engines. They are placed in the head section of a web page and provide information such as the page’s title, description, keywords, and other information related to the page’s content.

The information provided in the meta tags helps search engines understand the page’s relevance to specific keywords or phrases. This information helps the page rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs).

In addition, including keywords in the title and description tags is important for improving the user experience. When viewers make a query, the search engine displays the title tag and the meta description on the result page. These two pieces of information help a user decide, within a split second, whether or not a page is worth visiting.

Therefore, you must demonstrate that your article is useful to a potential visitor by providing relevant and accurate information in the title and description. This encourages users to click on your page, increasing traffic and enhancing engagement.

To check if you have used the correct keywords in the title and description, use the Eye10 On-Page SEO tool.

For instance, here is what the title and description look like for the home page of Cointelegraph:

And then, for a blog post for Grammarly’s website, you can see a clearer usage of keywords in the title and description for an informative article:

Types of Meta Tags 

Various elements in a web page’s HTML code could affect a page’s ranking. However, when we talk about meta tags, most knowledgeable people in the SEO field use them to refer to either title tags, meta description tags, meta keyword tags, or even a combination of two or all three.

1. Title tags

These appear at the top of a web browser and in the search engine results pages (SERPs) as the clickable title of a webpage. A title tag can be considered your webpage’s ‘headline.’ It’s like a short summary of what the page’s content is all about, just like the headline of a news article gives you an idea of what the article is about. It should be no longer than 60 characters and include the page’s main keywords.

2. Meta description tags 

The meta description tag is an HTML element that briefly summarizes a web page’s content. It appears in the SERPs under the page title and helps users understand the page’s context before clicking. This tag should be no longer than 160 characters and should accurately describe what the page is about.

3. Meta keyword tags 

The meta keyword tag is an HTML element used to specify keywords related to a web page. It was once used by search engines to index and rank web pages but is now generally considered to have little to no impact on search engine rankings. Instead, focusing on keyword-rich content and meta descriptions are recommended to help a page rank higher in SERP results.

Hence, for the rest of this article, we will focus primarily on title and meta description tags. In any case, to see how other types of HTML tags are used in your webpage and if correctly applied, the content analysis section of the Eye10 On-Page SEO tool shows you this information. This includes nofollow tags, noindex tags, robots, etc.

How to Incorporate Keywords in Meta Tags and Descriptions

Here are some best practices to follow when incorporating keywords in title tags and description tags:

• Your title tag and description tag should accurately reflect the content of your page. This helps users understand what they can expect to find on the page when they click on it. More so, using misleading keywords can hurt your website’s ranking in search engine results.

• Title tags and description tags should be concise and to the point. Search engines typically only display the first 50-60 characters of the title tag and the first 150-160 characters of the description tag in search results, so it’s important to keep your content short and relevant.

• Place the most important keyword around the beginning of the title tag and the description tag. This increases the visibility of the keywords to search engines and users.

• Incorporate your keywords into your title and description tags in a way that makes sense for your content and fits in naturally with the rest of the text. Don’t stuff your tags with keywords – search engines may penalize you for this. For example, suppose a website sells handmade jewelry. In that case, a well-written title could be “Handmade Jewelry | Unique Pieces,” and the description could be “Shop our collection of handmade jewelry, including one-of-a-kind pieces that are perfect for any occasion.”

• If you are lost for keyword ideas, the Eye10 Keyword Planner is a highly useful tool that helps you generate ideas and suggestions related to keywords you are already ranking for and that give you an edge over your competitors.

Conclusion

After all is said and done, when it comes to SEO, the most intricate and seemingly minute details can make a difference to your results. Therefore, it is important not to neglect the basics.

To avoid the kind of mistakes that other SEO professionals and site owners make, it helps to leverage tools such as the Eye10 On-Page SEO and others that provide you with real-time analytics data of your webpage. There and then, you can discover issues to be fixed or determine whether everything is working perfectly. Get started today and shoot ahead of competitors in your field.