What is a Meta Tag?
Peter Brissette • February 11, 2020
Hey there, Peter Brissette here with our monthly coaching training call, also, our monthly marketing message. I wanted to talk to you today about something I've been working with clients quite a bit on right now. And that involves some basics of search engine optimization, SEO and in particular what is on your actual website. Today what I want to talk about is what are meta tags we're going to get meta today. All right, let me share my screen here so we can look at a couple of things. What is a meta tag? Three things we'll kind of hit on here. Number one, it's important for search engines and I'll show you why and where, which also makes it important for those who are searching and it actually lives behind the page. What does all that mean? Well I will show you that real quick.
The first thing I want to do is when I do a search for anything, there are search results that come up. I searched Lighthouse Assisted Living and what came up here was their homepage. You can see there's a name here, Lighthouse Assisted Living: Assisted Living Littleton, Colorado. And then right here is a description of that page. This title, that's the title of the page is inside the meta tags, the metadata. This description is inside the metadata. There's two reason that's important that we said. One, this helps Google know what this page is about, so Google knows how to bring it up in the search results. But secondly, it's good for me as a searcher because I can look at this and go, "Oh, what is this information here and should I go ahead and click this link or not?" This description and title helped the person doing the search to better understand also what that page is about.
They're more likely to click the link to go look at the page. You can 100% control this title and this description for the search results that we're seeing here. So where does that happen? This gets set up in different websites, have a different way, but you set it up as part of the page settings. When you look here on this page, you're not going to see anywhere where it says meta-description or meta title. You don't see it. It's not something visible as you look at the page. But if I go look at the source code on the page, and I just did a search on the word meta. There's a lot of meta information I can find here. Meta description, so here's the meta description in the contents of that description. You'll see this description... Might be hard to see. Let me blow this up.
You see this description matches the description that we saw in the search results. We can also go... Now, where's my title? Well there's also a title tag. Let's see here. Yep, here it is right here, title. Those are the meta tags, they show up on the backend of the page in the data, which again it's going to help both Google in particular a search engine, understand what that page is about. And it also helps the person searching, understand what that page is about and why they should click the link to actually go and visit that page. If you don't know what your meta tags are, you don't know what your titles or descriptions are, we can do a quick audit of your websites that goes through and will tell us page by page every title and every description and let us know if things are missing or things that might need to be updated on that.
If you have questions about that, we can run a free report for you. That's the question of the day. What is a meta tag? A meta tag is data that's behind the page that helps search engines and help people doing the search and lives behind the page. Hopefully you found that useful and we'll talk to you again next month.
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The last question that should we follow our competitors on social media? Sure, why not. You know, you want to see what they're doing and see what's happening there. You know if you're going to be active and you're really trying to use social to build your business then having a good idea what's what your competition is up to is probably important. And you know sometimes what I find with so called competitors is that we you know often times find people that we can collaborate with. It doesn't necessarily mean they are competitors so we work with a number of other marketing agencies and provides some services for them for their clients that they don't necessarily do, but they hire us to do it for them. So like I work with other marketing agencies, so they're not necessarily, you know, your competitor and everything. So but yeah, see what's going on you know, investigate, read up on them, see what they're doing, check out their websites, see what they're ranking for. You know, the more you understand the competitive landscape, the more you know what you should be doing and what you need to do.
And the last question that we have is, can you say more about running a test on TikTok yeah, I so I'm not on TikTok I'm not using tiktok. I wind up watching a lot of TikTok videos on Facebook and the Facebook reels. I think it's fascinating. I find it very interesting. But it's not a platform that I've taken the time to jump on at this point. Again, based on where I'm at with strategy and so forth, it's not a fit for me. But anytime you're using any platform, if you're going to do something, you want to come up with some means of measurement. How am I going to measure success? What does success look like? Is it I, you know, posted a video and I got a thousand views. Is that success you know or is it actually driving traffic and are you tracking how much traffic and then are you tracking what happened to that traffic? Did they fill out a form, did they make a phone call? Like what's the, where do you want that to go? So we really need to step back and think about that whole process. Of creating content, I'm pushing this through to, you know, to my website. And this is what I want to have happen. This is what I wanted the results to be. And then how am I going to track it? How am I going to measure it and do that so anytime you're spending, anytime you're doing something new in particular. Or you're spending any money you need to track it all the way through. All the way through.
The next question that we have is if you have a GoDaddy web page already and are having some issues, are you able to switch over somehow? You can build your website on any other platform and then just you just change the domain where the domain points. So yeah, you can do that anytime. Thank you, Peter.
Next question is how powerful are paid plans to things like Google Adwords or whatever it is called now regarding driving traffic, how can you possibly compete when you don't have the cash to put towards such programs? Yeah, so that's where you gotta get creative. So again we're small businesses and we don't have you know, unlimited funds to you know, just throw a bunch of ads up and you know compete with some other big companies so. Again, this goes back to what are the things I can really do better, because chances are your website is getting some traffic and it could be getting good traffic, but if your messaging isn't clear on your website, you're not getting them to take the next step. They're not making a phone call or filling out a form. So where I can put energy and effort is in that messaging and that and being very clear about who I'm working with, the problem I solve, how I solve it. So that whoever does come across my radar, I have a much higher chance of converting that person then someone else. So you know it's not the best product that always wins, it's who's the best communicator. And so that's why I talk about what you own and what you can't can control and making sure that is dialed in. And doing what it's supposed to do so that if you do go I, if I'm dialed in and I know everything is working well with my website and it's communicating clearly now, I can spend a small amount on ads and drive a small amount of traffic knowing that I'm probably going to get a decent amount of conversions because my messaging's on point and so I don't have to spend as much as the big guy. But I can be more effective because I've spent time working on the stuff that really matters. Thanks, Peter.
The next question is, we have a couple more here. What is your choice for a website hosting platform? So if you're going to host WordPress, my number one choice would be sitegroundsiteground.com That would be my top choice for WordPress hosting that, great support and all that. And again, you can have your. Domain on GoDaddy and it can point to wherever. It can point to Squarespace. It can point to site ground wherever it needs to go. But yeah, for WordPress site ground would be my top choice.
The next question is, can other businesses similar to mine attach to my website and then their ads show up on their Facebook page? No, I don't see how that can happen. Thank you.
The next question that we have is I used to utilize local provider gizmo to be able to personally update my website due to its ease of use. If you knew word you could do gizmo. Do you know of a website editing platform that would be as simple. I don't need an online store so our website just needs to be simple clean design that I can update content. So any of those platforms we talked about we believe with Squarespace can do that. Our platform that I mentioned can do that as well. So that's something that I know someone that was asking about that, I'll just give you my contact info. You guys you know can provide my contact info. If you're interested in looking at that, we can we can talk about that one-on-one Thanks, Peter.
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