Everything you Need to Know About Meta Tagging
Meta tagging is a crucial component to the pillars of your content marketing. These are the pillars I designate as your SEO and your site design in conjunction with your email marketing, social media and paid advertising campaigns. But there are a few things to keep in mind when engineering your description.
Your Meta Tag- Fundamental to UX
Your meta description is rather independent of the 5 pillars. This is because it doesn’t impact your SEO.
Let me repeat that; your meta description adds no search value whatsoever to your site.
“So why the heck am I even worried about implementing metadata for my site, James!?” Good question.
Once title tags and onpage content gets your site ranking on the SERPs, your meta description describes what your company has to offer them.
As you likely already know, a meta tag is a designation displayed on search engine results pages below your clickable headline, the title tag. Just like your title tag, It provides a description of a content page while toeing the line of objectivity. But unlike your title tag, it is not search engine-crawlable; it is meant solely to appeal to the search engine user as a thorough description of less than 156 characters. The trick is to use these limited characters wisely.
Structuring Your Meta Tag
Red3Media never won a new lead online because a search engine user coincidentally thought “I am going to search the (very) subjective term ‘Red3Media.’ They seem like they offer internet marketing services.” And the same goes for Tim’s Billiard Hall and the same goes for Tony’s Landscaping.
Why am I mentioning this seemingly obvious piece of information? Because there is no need to wasted valuable meta description real estate on subjective terms like your company name. Your page already landed on the search engine thanks to your quality SEO; now drive your lead to click your site with an objective description of how you can benefit them. Hint: you aren’t going to get anywhere plugging your brand name.
First, what NOT to do…
The above is a perfect example of how to NOT write a meta description. Note how there is no objective, descriptive term at all related to internet marketing or anything we are targeting search traffic for.
There also is no mention of what Red3Media does or why anyone would ever want to select the link based on that meta description. This is probably also a great time to mention you should avoid exclamation points– they are crawled as spammy.
And Now, What TO do…
The more objective and descriptive your meta description is, the easier it is for search engines users to determine what your company offers and if it is in line with what they are looking for.
Based on the above example, the user can easily determine Red3Media is an internet marketing agency who can help them build content marketing and target their audience.
Until your company is the next Amazon or Toyota of your industry, your goal, I would imagine, is to grow. And to grow, you need to build your customer base. And to build your customers, you need to generate leads. This requires you to set your ego aside and limit using your company name, especially in your content marketing.
You need to focus on what your industry provides with your content marketing. Your brand recognition will follow once your site is the top SERP hit in your field. But until your company is a household standard, no one will be searching for your company by your unique name.
Make sure you are correctly managing your internet marketing or, better yet, leaving it to the pros. Organizations such as Red3Media work with your company to effectively target your audience organically. Supplementing your SEO, we also offer design, social, paid and email marketing campaigning. Learn more how we can help your internet marketing efforts here.
