Meta Tags for Photographers

There’s a lot of debate in the SEO community about the effectiveness of the Meta fields. In this SEO Corner, we’ll take a look at Meta tags and what they can and can’t do for your PhotoBiz site. We’ll also look at ways to maximize your Meta Tag effectiveness.

What Are Meta Tags?

Meta tags are HTML codes that are inserted into the header on a web page, generally after the title tag. The purpose of the tag is to provide information for programs such as browsers or search engine crawlers to interpret about your website. PhotoBiz natively supports three types of Meta tag in the Search Engine Optimization section: Meta Title, Meta Description, and Meta Keywords.

There are two places in your PhotoBiz site where you can build Meta information: Globally, and per page. Global meta tags can be found in your Flash/HTML Control Panel by clicking on the Search Engines icon. Meta information you add in these fields will become the default Metas for your entire site. You can also configure Meta Description and Keywords for individual pages, including your Splash Intro. These can be found generally on the Details tab of any page in your site, under Search Engine Optimization.

You do not need to fill this information out for every page of your site. If you leave these fields blank, they will use the default Meta Tag information you have set up in your Search Engines section. However, if you want to have different keywords or descriptions on specific individual pages, this is where you set them up.

Who wants some Meta Tag facts?

…some of these may surprise you!

Visibility: The Meta Description tag and the Meta Keywords tag are not seen by visitors. Instead, these tags main purpose is providing meta document data to user agents, such as search engines. The Meta Title tag can be seen by visitors, usually on the browser title bar or tab.

Rankings: Surprisingly enough, the Meta Description and Meta Keywords tags are not currently used by Google for search engine rankings. They are used by Yahoo and Ask along with some private or industry-specific search engines, but do not weigh strongly in website ranking criteria. This doesn’t mean, however, that Meta tags aren’t important. Meta information can help your site’s “findability” in several important ways.

Click-appeal: A good Meta Description can increase your site’s click-through from search results, by providing easy to understand information right there with the search result. The Title tag doesn’t affect your ranking either, but it does help your indexing and your branding. First-page ranking won’t do you much good if your site doesn’t have click-appeal.

Readable text: You may have heard that Flash websites aren’t SEO friendly because they lack text. While it’s true that Flash has less readable text than HTML, your Meta tags are text-readable to search engine crawlers. You can use them to create keyword associations you may not want to have visible on your site, such as common misspellings or alternate names.

Do you Really Want More Info…?

…OK, here comes some detailed info.

So now that you understand Meta Tags, the next question is: What should you put in your Meta fields? There are three Meta Tag fields PhotoBiz supports natively. We’ll look at each of them in turn and go over what type of information works best. You can use these guidelines for both the Global Meta Tags, and your page-specific Meta Tags.

Meta Title: The info in your Meta Title will appear with your search engine results as well as the top of the browser itself, or in the tab if your visitor is using a tabbed browser. Your Meta Title should therefore reflect the name of your business, at the very least. You can also include something you want your potential visitors to know about you - your city, your main specialty, even your telephone number.

You’ll want to make sure your title is relevant to the content of your website. You want people to click through to your site, but you also want the people clicking through to be the ones who are actually looking for the type of service you’re providing. The title is the first thing that will catch a prospective client’s eye on the search engine results page. “Joe Smith Wedding Photography - Serving The Greater Los Angeles Area” for example, will work better than “Joe Smith Photography” if you’re looking to attract L.A. area brides.

Meta Description:  Meta Description is an often-misunderstood tag. What it does do is improve click-through. An informative, well-written description will get your link in a search result page clicked on more than a poorly-written one.

What constitutes a well-written description? Clear, relevant information in an “about us” format is a good guideline for most types of pages. The meta description should describe in just a couple of sentences what the reader can expect if they click on the page. Being on page one doesn’t help much if people aren’t clicking.

You should avoid using keywords in the meta description tag. Google will drop the description if that field contains a list of keywords. Normally, if there is no description or the description contains only keywords Google will pull random text from the page. If you’re using a Flash template, that means Google will have nothing to use in that field and your link will appear with no description.

Another thing to watch out for is long paragraphs of information in the description field. If the text is too long, Google may drop it from the search results and display the link with just blank space underneath. Two well written sentences are much better than two paragraphs. Avoid the temptation to tell the story of your business in your Description tag - that info is best set up in your “About Us” info page.

The description doesn’t just have to be in sentence format; it’s also a great place to include structured data about the page. For example, news or blog postings can list the author, date of publication, or byline information. This can give potential visitors very relevant information that might not be displayed in the snippet otherwise. If you use your Calendar or Testimonial pages to present newsletters or topical information, you might consider using this format for the Meta Description on that page.

In a nutshell, the description should be concise, accurate and human-readable.

Meta Keywords:  Google officially announced in September 2009 that they no longer use the keywords meta tag in their page ranking. SEO experts have suspected this for awhile, but Google is not very forthcoming about their search ranking criteria. Google encourages websites to rank on clear, human-accessible and relevant information rather than on tricks with keywords. For that reason, keywords don’t do much for your page rank.

Should you still set up Meta Keywords? Absolutely yes! Some search engines such as Yahoo and Ask to still appear to use the tag, though they don’t rank it very highly. Keywords and phrases are indexed as search terms for your site, so how you set them up impacts your searchability. It’s also important to remember that while the crawlers don’t necessarily recognize the Keywords tag for ranking, they do read the text in the field as page text. This is expecially important if you don’t use Mirror HTML; you can use the Keywords meta to add crawler-readable text. The appropriate format for your keywords is very specific and consistant across all the search engines: comma delimited words and phrases, relevant to the subject of the website.

There’s a couple of caveats here: In general, you want to avoid anything that could be interpreted as misleading or spamming in your keyword content. Avoid using keywords or keyphrases that do not describe what you actually do. For example, “celebrity photos” is a high-traffic search term, but unless you are doing celebrity photography using it can get you downranked.

Avoid excessive keywording - too many similar keywords can look spammy to the crawlers. For example, don’t list your photography speciality as a keyphrase group with every city in a 50 mile radius. Instead, choose a few of the largest cities in your area and use those. Most people in smaller communities will search by the nearest major town.

Finally, one of the most valuable uses of the Meta Keywords tag is to add common mispellings. This allows the crawler to categorize those mispellings as search terms for the page. You don’t want to put misspellings on the page itself, but since the content portion of the tag is still read by crawlers, putting the mispellings in the keyword tag gets it indexed as a search term without it being visible to your visitors (and thus potentially making your site look less professional).

What’s Next?

Next time we’ll look at some other ways you can optimize your Search Engine results, as well as some common mistakes to avoid.