Maximising Your Meta Tags for SEO and CTR

Laura Ginn

In recent years, people have paid less attention to the optimisation of Meta descriptions and Meta tags for good reason. It’s no longer an important thing to do when attempting to get your webpages ranking highly for your chosen search terms. However, it’s important that you don’t overlook the value of paying a bit of attention to your Meta tags. Since Google and other search engines use your page title and Meta description to give a brief description of your page in their search results, it’s important that you are displaying what you want to display. These little snippets of text get a lot of close attention from searchers hunting their way through the natural listings when looking for the ‘right’ website. Let’s take a look at a few things you can do to maximise this potential.

Fill Out Meta Tags in Detail

First rule – use all of the characters at your disposal. You need to consider your Meta tag as being the introduction to your webpage for people who know nothing about your site. You want to get as much information across as possible – without complicating things. Be succinct, but use what you have to provide a detailed account of what your website is all about.

Include Target Keywords Naturally

The last thing you want to do is to make your tags appear to be spammy, but there’s nothing wrong with including your keywords as long as they appear to fall naturally within your tags. Be as strategic as possible with this. It’s an idea to try to include your webpage title, your brand name if it’s different, and a sentence which includes one of your prime keyword phrases. If you can make the tag compelling, natural and include some of your key terms, you’re onto a winner.

Do Your Meta Tags Include a Call to Action?

Although we’ve been talking about keyword terms, which leads us to naturally think about the effects you might get SEO wise, let’s not forget what this is really all about. You’re optimising these tags to try to draw people to use your site. Including a call to action is obviously going to increase your chances of succeeding here. A good technique is to ask a question in your tags. Rather than stating what you do, question what other people are doing, and ask if they could be performing better by utilising what you do. You won’t have to change your keywords, or adjust your character numbers too much if you are clever about this. We’re really moving into the realms of copywriting rather than optimisation here, but good copywriting should be both. Think about using phrases like ‘Have you tried’ ‘Would you like to’ and ‘Find out how to’, and then launch into the rest of your tag. This will help to draw people to your site, because you are literally telling them that you can help, rather than just presenting what you do.

To summarise, to create great Meta tags which will help your click through rate and SEO practices, try to think like an SEO worker and a copywriter. If you can combine these two disciplines, then you stand every chance of ending up with great Meta tags that really can help you.