A lot of online marketing novices and even some self proclaimed experts will consistently make the same mistakes when attempting to do SEO for their business website. Most people have read about how important SEO is and how it can easily make or break your sales. Some businesses may not be able to afford an SEO company or simply do not want to use an SEO company, so they try to go at it themselves. 9 times out of 10 it winds up close to a disaster.

One of the most important on-page SEO techniques is optimization of the meta tags. The meta tags contain important information and data which the search engine crawlers look at to acquire information about web pages.

Misusing the title tag

There are several ways to misuse the title tag. The most common error that seems to pop up is not including a keyword within the title tag or just inserting your company name or inserting a very generic keyword which is not going to help your rank. For example, if you are trying to optimize for keywords relating to SEO company or SEO company in NJ, etc.. we could make our title tag as follows: Professional SEO Company in New Jersey. This is direct, to the point and focuses on the keywords we would like to optimize for. It also does not abuse the title tag. Which brings us to our next point.

People also will abuse the title tag and just load it up with 20 keywords and make it a mile long in hopes of ranking the page higher, not realizing that the Google and the other search engines only process the first 60-80 characters (approximately) depending on whom you speak to. The bottom line is that you need to keep the title tag short and concise when doing SEO and make sure it conveys what you are optimizing for.

Misusing the description tag

The description tag is there in order for the search engine spiders to acquire information about the page. There is more wiggle room for a little more content as the search engines read anywhere from 150-180 characters out of the description tag. Your meta description tag should include information about the specific page and if you use careful and discretionary keyword insertion in here, it will make for some very valuable relevance according to the search engines. One of the most important aspects of on page SEO is the proper use of the description tag. If your description meta tag contains a mile long list of just keywords, be prepared for your site to be devalued as the search engines look down upon this as spam. Make sure to use discretion in this part of the SEO process.

Misusing the meta keywords tag

According to wide speculation and quite a bit of research, it would appear that the meta keyword tag has little to no effect on the on-page optimization process. Apparently the search engines have devalued this meta tag, most likely due to heavy abuse of the tag. When performing SEO services, it probably can\’t hurt to insert your most important keywords into the meta keywords tag, but just know that it will not have much effect on the overall SEO of your site.

Author Bio: John Ferrughelli is the founder and president of Potenture, a professional website design and SEO company. His company specializes in SEO, Pay per click marketing, website design and social media marketing.

Category: Marketing
Keywords: meta tags, seo tips, seo, search engine optimization