In Part 1 of this article, I defined Title Elements and META Tags and took you step-by-step through how to create an optimized Title Element. Now it's time to create your optimized META Description Tag.

Create Your META Description Tag

Take your list of target keywords and phrases and open another text file. Again, you can use an existing sample META Description Tag as your template. Let's say our existing description is:

<META name="description" content="Chiropractic office in Sherman Oaks - Our Chiropractic Care office,is Conveniently located off the 405 freeway- Dr Jean Guillaume Malinvaud Chiropractor in Sherman Oaks">

You can make your META Description Tag as long as you like, but only a certain portion of it will get indexed and displayed bysearch engines. According to Danny Sullivan in his (old but still relevant) article How to Use HTML Meta Tags200 to 250 characters of the META Description gets indexed but less than that gets displayed, depending on the search engine.So you want to make sure all your important keywords are listed towards the start of the tag.

Now take your list of keywords for the home page in order of importance. For our fictional florist these were:

  - Chiropractor Sherman Oaks
  - Chiropractic Office Sherman Oaks
  - Chiropractic care

Now you need to create a readable sentence or two describing your web site and incorporating these keywords so they make the best use of the keyword real estate available. Because search engines often display the contents of the META Description Tag in the search results, it is very important that your sentences make grammatical sense and are enticing enough to
encourage readers to click on your link. Let's start with:

'Chiropractic office in Sherman Oaks - Our Chiropractic Care office,is Conveniently located off the 405 freeway- Dr Jean Guillaume Malinvaud Chiropractor in Sherman Oaks'

Ok, so that's around 150 characters long and gets our three important keyword phrases included. But it's a bit bland. Weneed to add something to entice the searcher to click on it. How about:

'Get a Free Consultation call (818) 380 0436'

So now we have the following completed META Description Tag:

<META name="description" content="Chiropractic office in Sherman Oaks -Our Chiropractic Care office,is Conveniently located off the 405 freeway - Dr Jean Guillaume Malinvaud Chiropractor in Sherman Oaks - Get a Free Consultation call (818) 380 0436">

Our new tag is optimized for our keyword phrases, it's around 200 characters in length, it describes our site accurately, itspeaks to the reader and it (hopefully) entices them to click on the link and view the site.

Create Your META Keywords Tag

We're almost there. Now it's time to create your optimized META Keywords Tag. Let me stress here that this Tag is quiteunimportant in the grand scheme of things. Not many of the search crawlers even support it any more. If you have the time and you really want to create META Keywordstags for your pages, then go ahead, but if not, then leave them out of your code altogether. This tag will have very littleimpact on your overall SEO campaign.

Assuming you do want to create a Keywords tag, take your list of target keywords and phrases and open another text file. Again,you can use an existing sample META Keywords Tag as your template. Let's say our existing Keywords Tag is:

<meta name="keywords" content="chiropractor Sherman Oaks, Chiropractic office sherman oaks, Sherman Oaks Chiropractor, Chiropractic care, Dr Jean-Guillaume Malinvaud, Chiropractor San Fernando valley, Sherman Oaks" />

You are just including a list of related keywords to include in this tag. Now take your list of keywords for the home page in order of importance:

  - Chiropractor Sherman Oaks
  - Chiropractic Office
  - Chiropractic care

Because you have a lot more room in this tag, a good rule of thumb for creating a META Keywords Tag is to include the keywords and phrases you are targeting with your site content, as well as some terms that you don't necessarily want to use in your site copy but are still relevant to the site content. For example, the site copy, TITLE and META description tags would include the most important search keywords, but the META Keywords Tag could be used for keyword variations andcombinations that don't appear in the visible site text, but that people may also search for. Examples include plurals, contractions, slang, variations, misspellings, cultural nuances and industry jargon.

For our fictional florist, these may include things like:

  - Headache
  - subluxation
  - Spinal decompression in chiropractic care
  etc...


However, when creating your Keywords Tag, you should not repeat any particular keywords within your META Keywords Tag more than five times

So we need to fix the draft tag to remove the excess repetition of the words "flowers" and "weddings". This is easy to do because some of the keyword phrases already incorporate these single generic keywords.


Tailored TITLE and META Tags

While some webmasters remember to include a META Description and a META Keywords Tag in their home page HTML code, many forget to include them on every page of the site that they want indexed. Or worse, they duplicate the homepage TITLE and META Tags on all other pages. To give a web site the best ranking ability possible, it is highly recommended that each page of the site include a unique TITLE tag and unique META tags, individually tailored to the content of that specific page.