Travel Marketing Tips > Meta Tags

How Meta Tags help your site be seen.

Your web designer should know all about Meta Tags. To run a quick check, load your website in a new browser window. Look at the very top left of the browser, it should say something relevant about the page or your company. If it says "untitled" you have a problem. I have titled this page "Understanding Meta Tags", can you see it up top there? This is a TITLE tag.....

The most important Meta Tag. <TITLE>

The title tag of your page is one of the most important factors to consider when optimizing your webpages. Almost all search engines & directories place a high level of importance on keywords or phrases found in your title tag. This tag is also what the search engines usually use for the title of your listing in the search results.

We recommend that you include 2 or 3 of your most important keyword phrases in the title tag, BUT be careful not to just list keywords. Search engines will display 60 to 115 characters of your title tag.

Make your title exciting or at the least, very informative! Even if you get to #1 in the search engines your listing still needs to compel a click to your site.

Each page of your site should have it's own title tag with it's own keywords/phrases that relate to the page that it appears on. If your website is all about Italian Tours make sure the pages for tours to Rome are titled that way, and not with a generic Italy Tours title, same for the rest of the pages in your site.

Meta Description Tag

The description tag is a well-written description of your website that includes your keywords and phrases. This is the text some of the search engines will display when your site is returned with a search query. It needs to be eye catching and something that will stand out against all the competition surrounding it. If your page does not have this tag, often the first few lines of your website will be picked up and displayed with search queries.That could really hurt your click through rate. Most search engines will index approximately 200 characters of the meta description tag.

Meta Keywords Tag

This is going the way of the DoDo bird. Due to years of heavy misuse, search engines can no longer rely on the information in this tag to accurately reflect the sites contents. Only one of the major engines still admits to using it. I always include this tag when creating a site, I just don't spend too much time with it, nor do i rework it for each page.

Now that you know what these Meta Tags are, go back to Travel Marketing Tips and see how WORDTRACKER can help you find the best keywords/keyphrases to use in these tags!