META Keyword Field – stop wasting your time, focus on Titles & Meta Descriptions instead

Forget about “keywords” when it comes to your website. The only time you should be using the term “keywords” is when you’re talking about keyword research. If you’re referring to that field inside your website CMS called keywords or the META Keywords field, you’re wasting your time. Search engines stopped paying attention to the META Keywords field a long time ago and you should too.

Page Titles & Meta Descriptions – fundamental SEO components

Instead – you should direct your attention to page titles and meta descriptions, these two fields DO make huge difference to where your website ranks and how many people click through to your site.

Page titles and meta descriptions are hidden code fields on your website that not only indicate what your webpages are about, they also directly appear in the search results.

Below we’ve highlighted where the title and meta description appear in the search results in our example search for “east perth dentist“. In this example, these fields are well written which ensures that helps ensure the site ranks no 1 (its not the only reason though). The well written meta description also helps increase the likelihood a searcher is going to click on that link or result.

Ensuring that every page on your website has customised, hand written page titles and meta descriptions on every page can often double or triple your website traffic overnight.

How to set your page titles and meta descriptions in Wordpress

If you have a Wordpress website we manage or that has been built by us you’ll have the ability to edit page titles and meta descriptions yourself. (Most other modern CMSes have the ability to set page titles and meta descriptions too)

Sidenote: if you’re running Wordpress and want this functionality, you should install the Wordpress SEO plugin by Yoast

To set these fields, just open up the page or product you want to edit and you’ll see directly under the edit window where you can set these fields. The screenshot below shows you the SEO edit window for this post. Once you’ve set the fields just Save or Update the post or page. If you’re updating an existing page or post it may take Google a few days to pickup the changes and update the search results.