SEO Ranking: On Page Factors – Head Tags

Head Tags

SEO ranking is about using steps to help your site in the search engines. These are the "On Page Factors" that matter: Head tags, body tags, and Url's.

First up; Head tags are the tags that show up in the code of the Head element on an html page code.

Not familiar with what I'm talking about? Go to a webpage and then under the View section of your internet browser, select "View Source". Head tags are at the top of that page of code… like below.

There is a seemingly infinite amount of possible data, scripts and tags that can and do go in the Head element. For a reference you can check out Head Element.

Today we'll reference the four important ones (…as of August 2009) for SEO ranking purposes: Title, Meta Description, Link rel="Canonical" and Meta Robots.

Title – this is the Macdaddy of on-page keyword elements, which testing by various groups has shown is the primary factor affecting on page SEO results.

The best practice is to use the keyword term or phrase as the first words in the pages 'Title tag'. So for instance, your keyword research is showing you that your page about "Lettuce growing" would benefit from being optimized for the keyword phrase "quick growing lettuce", you would use place those terms at the very start of your title tags.

Meta Description is, in most cases the only meta tag that you should spend any time on. (There are many other meta tags but they have little to no effect on your search ranking, especially now with Yahoo and Bing merging search. Don't use 'em.)

The Meta Description tag will often be shown as the description that follows the page title on a search engine result page. (Especially if it is an accurate description and is not filled with numerous spammy repetitions of the search phrase or overly hyped up phrasing. Do that and you will be penalized!) Remember that only 160 characters will be shown, so anything more than that is not recommended.

The idea here is to help searchers to see if your page is relevant to their search request. However, the meta description tag copy may not always be displayed in search results. Often search engines will show a section of your page's content that has the exact words used in the search query – so that means your pages better have text that matches the keyword phrase. More about that when we get to the body tag…

Rel="Canonical" This tag was introduced to help solve the problem of sites having multiple pages with the same content and the Search Engines then not knowing which page to include or exclude. Multiple pages of the same content can happen on many sites due to the way categories, print pages or session ID's are setup.

If your blog or site is larger and complex, it's best to use the canonical URL tag to prevent duplicates and unplanned, appended URL strings from confusing search engines and causing your ranking to drop. Below is what it looks like on this site:

link rel="canonical" href="http://www.toplocalrankings.com"

Meta Robots – There is some debate as to whether this is a "needed" tag. If you have a robots.txt file, you certainly do not. However, it's included here because you must make sure that if it has been used on your site, this tag does not contain any code that could direct the search engines to not crawl your site.

Like if the code shows the below; Your search traffic will drop off a cliff!!
meta content="index, nofollow" name="robots"
or
User agent: *
Disallow: /

Apply good keyword research, and then use that research to fill in appropriate Title and Meta Descriptions in your Head element; You'll have a great start to getting better rankings.

What's your opinion on this?