Meta Keywords & Meta Description

What are meta tags?

A meta tag is a piece of code used to give information to the search engines. Meta tags are not visible to your website visitors, but search engines look for them when they scan a website.  With a meta tag can tell the search engines who the author of the website is, what language it should be read in, what pages should not be submitted to the search engines, etc. There are many meta tags, but only a few of them relate to search engine optimization; namely meta description and meta keywords.

With Website Tonight you do not need to know any code.  Website Tonight has a spot for you to put in your webpage’s description and keywords, and it builds the code for you.

Meta Description

The search engines have a limited amount of space for your meta description. They will only display 160 characters, including blank spaces. If your description is longer than 160 characters then they will cut it off and ignore the remainder.

Before we explain how to update your meta description we want to point out something that confuses many people who are new to SEO.  There are multiple reasons the search engines might not use your meta description.  Maybe you added one and forgot to publish it.  Or maybe the search engine hasn’t updated that page of your website since you added and published it.  Or maybe they felt that your description wasn’t as good of a hook.  Lets explain a little more about that last one.

Your meta description is a suggestion, and the search engines might ignore your suggestion even if you wrote a good meta description.  Instead they take bits and pieces of the text on your website and display that.  Search engines do this because they are trying to show the searcher why they selected this site as a result.  If the searcher put in a phrase that is an exact match from somewhere on your website then Google will likely show them the match with keywords bolded instead of using your meta description.  Search engines even do this if the phrase is not an exact match but the keywords do match.

In any case it’s still important to have a good meta description because the search engines look for it when determining the quality of your website.  So here is how to add a meta description to your Website Tonight project.

1. Log into Website Tonight.
2. Go to the page you want to add a meta description for.
3. Hover over the Properties icon (top center).
   It looks like this:  
4. From the dropdown list select Meta Data.  (note below)
5. You will see a box for the meta description and meta keywords.
6. Once you have added your meta tags click save.
7. Repeat these steps for each page.  (note below)
8. Preview and Publish.

Note Step 4:  When you click Page a window should popup.  If it does not then turn off your popup blocker or tell it to allow this site.

Note Step 7:  It’s important that each page has a distinctly unique meta description and keywords.  Do not use the same description or set of keywords on more than one page.

Meta Keywords

The search engines ask that you to provide them with a short and concise list of words and phrases that define each page of your site.  These should be terms that you believe people that are looking for your website will search.  The search engines want this to help them provide accurate results.  They will use this information when determining which search results you’re listed for. This list is called the meta keywords.

A lot of people tend to believe that the search engines use the keywords as park of the ranking system. They do not use keywords to determine your rank, only your classification. Once they decide where to list you they will decide what rank you will have for those search terms and categories, but keywords play a insignificant part in this portion of the process.

It’s important to understand that the search engines do not want you to use the same keywords on every page.  They can already tell what your website is about by scanning the content.  They want you to give them a list of words or phrases from each page that you feel are the most important words on those pages.  That means that the keywords and phrases should also be found on that page.  If they are not found on that page, or if they are not used very often on the page then the search engines might simply ignore your keywords. In short, they want keywords that are unique and relevant.

Separate your keywords and phrases with a comma.  It should look like this… Website Tonight, SEO, meta tag, search engine optimization, rank  …, and obviously you will want to use your own keywords and phrases.  Limit yourself to 10 – 15 comma separated terms.  The search engines will ignore everything after #15.

1. Log into Website Tonight.
2. Go to the page you want to add meta keywords to.
3. Hover over the Properties icon (top center).
   It looks like this:  
4. From the dropdown list select Meta Data.  (note below)
5. You will see a box for the meta description and meta keywords.
6. Once you have added your meta tags click save.
7. Repeat these steps for each page.  (note below)
8. Preview and Publish.

Note Step 4:  When you click Page a window should popup.  If it does not then turn off your popup blocker or tell it to allow this site.

Note Step 7:  It’s important that each page has a distinctly unique meta description and keywords.  Do not use the same description or set of keywords on more than one page.

Keyword Stuffing

Do not “keyword stuff” in your meta description or your meta keywords.  When search engines first introduced meta tags lots of people tried to abuse the system by stuffing the same keyword into the meta keywords.  They would use…  cool website, website tonight, website builder, easy website, cheap website, website help, website SEO  …or something to that effect.  For a short while it worked and websites that used this method would rank higher for the stuffed keyword (“website” in this example).  The search engine developers soon caught on and started punishing websites that did this by lowering their rank or removing them from the search results entirely.

Search engines don’t want you to do this because it skews their ability to give accurate results to the people searching.  It is okay to use the same term on the same page more than once, but don’t go crazy.  A much better list of keywords would be…   cool website tonight, easy website builder, cheap web tools, SEO help… as long as these terms were found on that page at least a couple times and were distinct from the other pages of the site.

It’s also not a good idea to put lots of words in for each comma separated term.  Search engines count search terms as partial and complete matches.  A complete match holds more weight than a partial match.  Even if someone searched for “Website Tonight SEO help” the keywords in our example would be a good match.  One of the keywords is a complete match and the rest is a partial match.

Do select terms you can compete for.  It would not be wise for Pro Site Tonight to use “website” as a keyword.  There are too many multimillion dollar companies competing for the word.  It’s a much better idea for us to specialize, which will result in lots more complete matches and a higher click through rate.  Instead of using “website” we use keywords and phrases like “Website Tonight SEO” or “Website Tonight Help”.  In the long run these terms get less searches, but we are far more likely to be a page one search result for them – and we are!