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There is only one meta tag that most search engines use – the description tag. It is not commonly used for SEO ranking purposes, but it is commonly used (including by Google) as the text on the search results listing.

The content of the description tag is used more often than not by Google when it displays the results pages for a keyword. It uses only the first 156 characters though so make sure if you are using it to check the length of the text. If you do not check the length your text will be truncated and it will look funny.

Microsoft Word has a great tool that will allow you to check the text length very quickly. This tool is visible on the status bar at the bottom of the page. To use it select the text you want to control the length and then double click on the word count statistics box.

The meta tags should appear in the head section of the page between the head tags.

Google is a little rascal when it comes to using or not using the meta description tag. When it does use it you can have full control of what is exposed to likely visitors but it will often switch what it uses at will with sometimes it just plucking a piece of text from your page.

If you want to determine what Google shows then the very first 156 characters of text on a page should be highly controlled because if it does not use the description tag it will use this text.

If you have a flash site or just use images with a little text, you have a problem! We have seen Google pick up the alt text from an image and display this when it didn\’t select to use our description tag. This will tell you to ALWAYS have some text on your page even if it is only 156 carefully selected characters (including spaces).

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Wordpress out of the box allows standard management of the primary SEO meta information. To extend the functionality we add our own super-charged version of the All-In-One-SEO Pack. The SEO pack makes it easy to modify the page title and page meta description.

The All-In-One-SEO Pack is a great WordPress plugin that completes the SEO aspects for WordPress. For some reason WordPress still has not got the SEO fixed out of the box.

The All-In-One-SEO Pack provides for you to change the most significant page elements – page title and page description. It also allows you to change the page keywords, but as we all know, search engines no longer take note of these because they have been spammed too much in the past. Google stopped using the keywords for page ranking in the early 2000’s.

Page Titles

This is the No1 SEO component to control. Always make sure that you control the page title. The page title appears in the browser window at the very top of the screen. Search engines use this in the listings and display it in their search results.

Always try to make the page title only contain the keywords you want the page to rank for. Try to restrict them to 2 or three maximum.

The page title is the MOST significant SEO page element because it is like the title of a book. And just like a book title, if it is good it will be more appealing to readers.

If your page needs to stretch to cover two or three keywords we have learned that you can still get great rankings from adding multiple keywords to the title. However, always try to make the page title as close to the keyword you want to rank for. Adding extra non-beneficial words detracts from the results achieved.

If you are a larger branded company you will likely want to add your company or brand name into the page title considering this is displayed on Google. Keep it short and simple though. Do not add your brand statement just your brand or company name.

Page Descriptions

This element is NOT used by search engines for ranking purposes. Nevertheless, most search engines will use this in their search results so it is important. We have found that Google will use the description most of the time. We have not yet learned how it resolves if to use it or not. At other times Google will use the first piece of text that it can find on the page. On Flash pages this can be an issue considering there is no content. This is one reason why you should constantly add at least one sentence of HTML text on a Flash based page so Google and other search engines have something meaningful to display in the search results.

By having a good description it will increase your click through rates because the text will be more attractive to people. Ensure that you use a maximum of 156 characters. If you use any more characters Google will cut short the rest. If you can keep your descriptions to–0 characters or less this is even better seeing Google sometimes adds a date to the beginning of the description which is part of the 156 characters it displays.

SEO Meta data shown on Google listing

Changing the meta data and page title

At the bottom of every page and post you will find the meta tags plugin details. Update the details appropriately. Note: If you can only use see the title for the plugin and no details, just click the title and the section will expand.

SEO Magic Webs SEO Pack

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