Meta-data is ‘data about data’. Its purpose is to make web pages easier to read by search engines, smart-phone users and visually impared visitors.
And a webpage that’s easier for search engines to read stands a better chance of getting to the top of the search results page.
This blog post introduces six of the more important types of meta data and explains their purpose.
- The meta description provides seach engines with a short description of your webpage. It’s the bit that appears beneath the title in a search result and it allows you to control what people read about your site when they look through a search engine results page.Check out the google search result for Cicada client First Line and you’ll see the following meta description:’First Line Support Ltd provide affordable outsourced IT support and telecoms services for businesses around Oxfordshire Buckinghamshire, Surrey and London’.
Like all meta-data, you should be able to edit the meta description for all the pages on your website through your Content Management System (‘CMS’). - Meta keywords. Less important for search engines than the meta description, meta keywords have in the past enabled you to specify the main keywords for a webpage. Currently, search engines pay more attention to keywords in the main copy of your webpage than they do to the meta keywords.
- The window title is the string of words you’ll see in the very top of your browser (with Internet Explorer, that means the horisontal blue bar). For example, if you visit the Cicada Online homepage, you’ll see that the window title is ‘Cicada Online Oxford | Internet and Search Engine Marketing Specialists’. The window title currently plays an important part in optimising a site for search engines.
- An image’s ‘Alt text’ provides an alternative information souce for people who are unable to see images in their browser, or who have disabled them. People sometimes disable images on their smart-phone browsers to make browsing faster. The Alt text should, as far as possible, replace the image. If an image is there purely for decorative purposes, it doesn’t really need to have Alt text.
- An image title should provide additional descriptive information about the image. Hover your mouse over any image on the Cicada website and a little yellow box appears containing some words. This is its title and it’s a great way to pack more information into a webpage, whilst keeping it easy to read.You’ll find some good tips here on the netmechanic website about using image titles.An image’s Alt text and title are primarily meant for human rather than search engine visitors, although Alt text is currently more important to search engines. Both should contain keywords for your webpage but remember: keywords must be relevent, authentic and not over-used.You’ll find a helpful comparison between the Alt text and title on the Search Engine Journal.
- Link titles, like image titles, are a great way to pack more information into a webpage whilst keeping it easy to use. Link titles make it easier for search engines to travel around websites and I think they’re currently one of the most important contributors to on-page SEO. A link title is the string of words that come up in a little yellow box, when you hover your mouse over a link on a webpage. Not all sites use them! I think putting in good link titles was a key to the success in this little SEO experiment that I wrote about in September 2009.
Points to remember
It’s really important to be authentic with your meta data and key words. This means:
- Think hard about the words that characterise the page and only use these
- Try to be as helpful as you can, don’t ever mislead people!
- Don’t over do it with a single, or a few keywords. This is called ‘keyword stuffing’ and can result in your page being de-prioritised by google
- Don’t cram endless keywords into your meta data, stick to the subject! Google doesn’t index (ie look at) more than 60 to 70 characters in the window title, and only the first 130 or so in the meta description.
Summary
Individually, each of these pieces of meta-data contributes just a little something to the ease of use of a website. You could get away without them, in a way that you couldn’t get away without say, a navigation bar.
However, when brought together, they really are an important part of on-page SEO. They’re helpful for people browsing on their smartphones and for visually impared visitors, and they add depth and value to more advanced users who may be looking for link and image titles.