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Optimize Your On-Page – Meta Tags, TechnicalAnalysis (Part I of II)

virginiaseo.org /blog/optimize-your-on-page-meta-tags-technical-analysis-part-1/

Chris Dill

This began as a quick blog post and quickly got a litt le too long f or one place, so I have split it intotwo. You can read the second post here: Optimize Your On-Page – Robots and Sitemaps (Part IIof II)

Optimize Your On-Page, On-Time

First, what is on-page optimization?

“On-page optimization is changing the front of a website or page to perform as well as itcan in the eyes of search engines.”

At Virginia SEO, we really enjoy search engine optimization and inbound marketing. We enjoy it somuch that we want to share the details of how we do it with you. So, let’s discuss a couple ofimportant topics as they pertain to on-page optimization. Last week we discussed website layout andalso got into page layout, content, and tit le tags. This week we will discuss meta tag optimization,technical analysis, on-site content, sitemap.xml, and robots.txt. Each of these items greatlycontributes to your websites rank and posit ion in the search engine results page (SERP), which has adirect correlation to the amount of traf f ic you get. Some studies show that 85% of users do not goto “Page Two” of search results, so posit ioning your website on page one of the SERPs is adesirable goal.

Meta Tag Optimizat ion

We brief ly discussed meta tags last week in our video training series, and we went over some broadtopics like what meta tags are, t it le tags, and the basics of keyword phrases. Just to reiterate, metatags are:

“Little bits of data embedded in your website that search engines can read. They canthen use this information on your behalf”

The f irst thing that really needs to take place when optimizing meta tags is that a strategy needs tobe developed. This keyword strategy is a website-wide strategy, and applies a theme to your entireSEO ef f orts. Without an overriding theme, our keyword strategy and meta tags will be all over theplace. Google is recognizing the overall theme of your content more and more and it is important tof ollow the same methods and strategies across your entire site.

Meta Description

Meta Tit le

Meta Property: locale, description, url, twitter:creator

As a non-web admin, the only ones you need to worry about are the tit le and description tags. Themeta tit le is what Google and Bing show as the result of your searches- it is the link shown onSERPs. The description meta is the two lines of text under a search result, which describe the pageshowing up in search.

“Bad” Meta Tag Optimizat ion

If you don’t “take care of ” these tags, Google will not look f avorably upon your page. These tags arealso meant f or your visitors- they need to be readable, well written, and descriptive. Take this f orinstance:

This is not an awesome description or t it le tag in my opinion. I have very litt le idea what this page is-is it a designers home page? SEO? Hosting? Now take a look at a good meta tag description:

“Good” Meta Tag Optimizat ion

This one is a bit better- it f ully describes the site and page I am visit ing. I and other visitors are muchmore likely to visit the better described site, and this applies to Google as well. They are more likely

As a web designer, there are lots of meta tags to create, optimize, and track. Some examples are:

to rank and promote the well-designed tags.

Designing these tags varies by website and by CMS, but most CMS’ have modules or plugins to helpout. I use WordPress, and one of the best plugins f or this is WordPress SEO, AKA Yoast. Yoastgives you a very simple interf ace in which to manage these tags f rom the admin panel of WordPress.I will go into more detail on my video series, where I will show you how to actually optimize these tagsf rom inside of WordPress.

Technical Analysis

Technical analysis of a website or page can literally be perf ormed one thousand dif f erent ways.There are so many tools out there that you could use a dif f erent tool every day f or a year. I have myown pref erred tools, and I will show you how to use them here- this is not to say that you can’t f indyour own tools or use someone else’s tools- these are just what I pref er.

Firefox Web Developer Addon- http://chrispederick.com/work/web-developer/

This addon has so many f eatures we won’t even discuss 1/20th of them here, but just know that thisplugin can do it all. It can analyze your page f or HTML errors, it can validate JS and jQuery. It can listout your page structure, check f or bad links, and show you image tags. Let’s look at my home pageat virginiaseo.org. One of the most interesting tools at least f or this discussion is: Inf ormation >View Document Outline. This shows you’re the tit le tags in a graphic and easy to understand manner,and also highlights what you are missing.

My second f avorite portion of this tool is Inf ormation > View Meta Tag Inf ormation. This really goesinto what we were discussing above, and allows you to view each pages underlying meta data in aneasy to read f ormat.

Firebug for Firefox- http://getf irebug.com/

This tool is great, and I use this tool extensively when I design websites. This tool is a necessity tohelp solve DOM and JS script errors, but it can also be used to analyze your website f or problems orimprovements. We won’t go into a lot of detail about this addon, but one of the f eatures I enjoy isthat it has ySlow integrated into it- so you can run a speed diagnostic on your website. This is a litt leof f - topic f or on-page analysis but it is def initely something you or your web designer should look at.

Raven Site Auditor- https://raven-seo-tools.com

I perf ormed a quick review of this tool here, but to sum it up: this tool is great. You need to take theinf ormation it presents with a grain of salt, because it can pull a lot of inf ormation that may or maynot be alarming- but seeing the inf ormation might cause you to be alarmed, when that is notnecessary.

Here is a crawl f or colonialdrivingschool.com, which is a website on which the current video training

series is centered around.

As you can see, the Site Auditor > Meta shows us great inf ormation about a website and how we canimprove the meta tags. If we drill down f urther we can see that a f ew of Colonial Driving School’spages are missing descriptions:

Raven SEO Site Auditor is one of many tools that can do this, and it costs money through a monthlysubscription. If you are looking f or f ree tools go and check out Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool.This tool shows you the same metrics in a tabular display, which is really usef ul f or bulk edit ing andf ixing issues.

You can read the second post here: Optimize Your On-Page – Robots and Sitemaps (Part II of II)

Chris Dill

SEO Expert at Virginia SEOChristopher Dill is a Christian entrepreneur who loves web design, marketing, andanything on a computer. He is the creator and author of The Dill Design, a localVirginia web design company. He also designed and runs Virginia SEO, which is a

SEO/SEM and marketing company. By using both design skills and a marketing plan, he can of f er hisclients an end-to-end solution which can help a small business succeed.Chris is currently f inishing uphis Master of Inf ormation Systems at University of Phoenix, and works by day as a Senior NetworkEngineer. Chris' hobbies consist of technology, computers, and cutting-edge sof tware.43

Latest posts by Chris Dill (see all)

Optimize Your On-Page – Meta Tags, Technical Analysis (Part I of II) - March 25, 2014

SEO Video Training – Session 2: On-Page Overview - March 21, 2014

SEO Video Training – Session 1: Introduction to SEO - March 15, 2014

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