Should Your Texas Website
Meta Tags Be Geo-Optimized?
Saturday, September 27th, 2008
Geographical optimization techniques can cover a full range. But can you optimize your Texas-based website’s meta tags for a geographically targeted site visitor?
Yes, but you need to be careful here. There are some dos and don’t and, of course, the occasional gray areas. Here are some things to think about before you start geographically optimizing those meta tags for Texas:
- First, determine whether your site is geographically targeted or not. No sense targeted meta tags geographically if the site isn’t targeted geographically.
- Don’t include any keywords, geographical or otherwise, in your meta tags that do not also appear in your body content. You especially want to stay away from stuffing keywords into your keywords meta tag.
- Speaking of keyword stuffing, don’t do it. It won’t help.
- Make sure that your geographically targeted meta tags cover only the geographic area that you target in your business. In other words, if you are a Dallas-based real estate agent that only deals in real estate in North Dallas neighborhoods then don’t try targeting your keywords for Fort Worth, Houston, or West Dallas, and certainly not for the entire state of Texas.
- For every page of your website, pick a primary and a secondary keyword and use only those two keywords in your title and description tags on each page.
- Make sure your meta tags are different on every page. Don’t use the same meta tags for every page on your website.
- Only include keywords in your keyword meta tag that appear in your body content at least 4 times. If a geographical kewyord doesn’t appear at least 4 times in your body content then you should rewrite your content until it does.
Meta tag optimization is not an exact science. Not every search engine pays attention to meta tags and those that do may also analyze your page content for your SERP listings. Still, you can influence your search engine listings with proper meta tags that are geographically targeted as long as those meta tags match the keywords in your body content. Don’t stuff keywords and make sure what you use is relevant.
