Today’s post is a guest post from Alan Coleman from OnlineAdvertising.ie. Alan is the founder & CEO on OnlineAdvertising.ie, they are specialists in the areas of Google Adwords & SEO. OnlineAdvertising.ie have had numerous campaigns published by Google as Case Studies and are finalists in the upcoming DMA’s in the “Best Digital Marketing Agency” category.
Last year we asked you to submit your social media questions for us to answer,
SM Receivables asked “what is the difference between tags and meta tags?”
We’ll hand you over to Alan for the answer:
I’m not 100% what the tweeter meant by “tags”, so I will give a give explanations for a few of the possibilities. Websites have 2 audiences, their users and the search engines. I will detail the relevance of each type of “tag” to both parties.
Title Tags
The “title tag” of your webpage is very important for SEO. It helps the search engine understand what your webpage is about. It is also generally the headline of your webpages’ listing on the Google search results so it will influence whether users visit your site or not.
Your “title tag” is also visible to your websites users at the very top of their screen. So it may influence conversions.
Meta Tags
A meta tag (which can be meta description or meta keywords among other things) is not visible to website users and has less (if any) value in SEO. Meta descriptions are important however, because the search engine will generally display the “meta description” in it’s search results. So well written copy in the “meta description” can increase clicks & conversions on your websites.
Alt Tags
An “alt tag” is the labelling of an image on a website. If you hover your icon over the image on a website it’s alt tag will appear. Search engines can’t see pictures so unless you tag them they will not know what the picture is of, and won’t be able to display them to people searching for such images, or attribute the keywords to your web page. So “alt tags” are important for SEO.
Tags
“Tags” also appear on blogs. You can tag words in a blog so if the user clicks on the tagged word they can see a list of all your posts which include this tagged word. This is great for SEO as it tells search engines you have plenty of content on this word(s) and will therefore increase your website’s value for this word(s). It is also great for users as they can easily find all your posts on their subject of choice.
If you have a social media question you would like answered leave a comment below.
