How to optimize metadata for your website

Optimizing the metadata of your website is critical if ranking on search engines is a priority for your business. Here are a few steps to get you started with optimizing your website and controlling the information that pops up on the SERP (search engine results page).
 
Choose a good SEO plugin
Most website building platforms these days have a built in SEO plugin. If you don’t already have one built into your site, choose a good SEO plug-in to add to your website. Do research on the best plug-ins for your platform. For example WordPress provides a great SEO plug-in called Yost.
 
Meta tags on each page
It is not enough to fill out the section for general meta tags (metatags) on your site. Filling in the meta tags for each page is required for effective SEO. In order to do this correctly you need to find a good keyword research tool so that you can fill in your best keywords for each page. Currently I use UberSuggest. It is a free keyword research tool from Neil Patel that is super effective for suggesting keywords and finding analytics and trends on current popular keywords. Fill in as many popular keywords as you can in the keyword meta tag section for each page.
 
Create effective meta descriptions
After you conduct keyword research and you have your lists for each page, then you can start filling in the meta descriptions. Make sure you don’t just copy and paste what is already on the public facing side of your page. The point is to create content that will come up on the SERP (search engine results page) when people search for keywords that will lead to your site. Essentially you are promoting each page on your site through these meta-descriptions. You want to draw people into the page by promoting it with your meta description. You are giving them a reason to click and read more. Tell them why they need to find more info on that topic and why they should click on your link versus the competitor above or below you.. How will it benefit their lives and what are they missing out on if they don’t read more.

Page titles
Next you want to choose an effective title for each page. The title could include a popular keyword that is trendy for the content that happens to be on that page. Again, you want to draw people into the page by creating a catchy title where they will have no choice but to click to view more.
 
Make sure to pay attention to character limits or character suggestions. There may not be limits to each section for characters but there are optimal character suggestions that you should follow so that people are exposed to the full story before it cuts you off on the SERP in order to draw them into each page. Generally 30 to 60 characters for the Page Titles and 140 characters for the meta descriptions. 
​Get started on your site!!