It would seem that the official view from Google regarding the use of Geo Meta Tags, is that there is no major benefit to be gained, in terms of Web Page Optimisation.

Google’s Matt Cutts has posted a video discussing this topic and states that Google attaches very little importance to assigning country association Geo Meta Tags, to your website.

You can watch Matt’s video below.

Geo Meta Tags are recognised meta tag elements that provide information on your website’s location and country.

According to Matt, there are more established elements Google can use to determine the home country of your website, including your IP address, top-level domain and association in Google Webmaster Tools.

An excellent tip, if you have different content (on subdomains for example), is that you can specify each of these in Google Webmaster Tools, and assign country associations to each specific page. This can be very handy if your website is available in multiple languages for example.

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More than 60% of the websites I review contain poorly written Title Tags. Many simply contain the company name or trading name of the website.

From a search engine perspective, your Title Tag is the most important Meta Tag and should contain the top two or three keyword phrases that you are targeting. Title Tags such as “Welcome to PetsRUs” or “The Acme Insurance Website” will not help your search engine rankings and will not produce high volumes of traffic to your site.

It is easy to achieve a high ranking for your trading name.

In most cases, search engines will list your website within the first few pages, when searched by your company name, especially if your domain name matches your trading name. That’s the easy bit. The more difficult challenge is to be found by users who are searching for the products or services you provide, using a more generic keyword search term, relevant to your business.

Including your company name within your Title Tag is a wasted opportunity.

Think about it, if a customer knows your company or brand name it is relatively easy for them to find you, not just via the internet but by more traditional methods such as Yellow Pages, offline advertising or even Directory Enquiries! So why waste valuable space promoting your company name within your Meta Tag?

As a guidline, your Title Tag should contain a maximum of ten individual words. Therefore do not waste this space, choose your keywords carefully and make sure that they are relevant to the page content.

Make sure your Title Tag includes your targeted keywords.

I recommend that you review all of your Title Tags and if necessary change them to include at least a couple of the top keywords you are targeting. You also need to ensure that each page of your website contains a unique Title Tag. Although simply creating a well written, search engine friendly Meta Tag is not sufficient to propel you to the first page of Google, it will make a difference and you should see some improvement in your search engine rankings over time.

For further information on creating search engine friendly Title Tags read my article “How To Write A Killer Title Tag“. Alternatively visit our Meta Tags Optimisation page.

Ensuring that each page of your website contains unique, well crafted and search engine friendly Meta Tags, is a vitally important part of the Web Page Optimisation process.

Obviously, in my job, I review many websites each day and less than 20% contain correctly structured Meta Tags. Missing Title, Description and Keywords Tags are quite common and it is not unusual to see Keywords Tags stuffed with hundreds of individual keywords.

Things you should not do in your Title Meta Tags

• Do not use generic web page titles such as “Untitled” or “New Page”.
• Do not use web page titles that have no relation to the content on the page.
• Do not repeat a keyword search term.
• Do not use very long titles that do not help your users.
• Do not stuff unnecessary keywords in your title tag.
• Do not use the same title for more than one web page.
• Do not use more than 10/12 indiviual words.

Things you should not do in your Description Meta Tags

• Do not use descriptions that have no relation to the web page content.
• Do not use generic descriptions such as “My web page” or “About Goldfish”.
• Do not use descriptions that only contain a list of keywords.
• Do not repeat the same keyword.
• Do not copy the entire content of your web page to use as your description.
• Do not use all capital letters.
• Do not use the same description on more than one web page.
• Do not use more than 30/40 individual words.

Things you should not do in your Keywords Meta Tags

• Do not repeat exactly the same keyword.
• Do not use capital letters.
• Do not use spaces between keywords, separate only with commas.
• Do not use more than 15/20 keywords.
• Do not use the same list of keywords on every page.

For further information on how to create search engine friendly tags, visit our Meta Tag Articles page. Alternatively view our Meta Tags Optimisation Service if you are interested in having your tags written professionaly.