Remember the post in September about finding your novel online with keyword phrases? If you want people to find your novel online, you have to have keyword phrases in your novel’s website. But equally important are meta tags.
Like keyword phrases, meta tags help search engines such as Google find your website. In order to set up your meta tags, you will first need to decide on your keyword phrases and build your website content as described in our blog post, “Find Your Novel Online with Keyword Phrases“. Once you know you keywords and have your website content, deciding on your meta tags is easy.
Since you have already decided on your keywords, you now have the meta tag for “keywords”. Now you will need to write a title and a meta description. Your title is the first sentence at the top of your website and should act as an introduction. Your title should be about six to ten words long and should contain one or more of your keyword phrases.
For example, if my keyword phrases include the phrases new fantasy author, dawn ross, and fantasy novel, then I could write the following title – “New Fantasy Author Dawn Ross Introduces her First Fantasy Novel.”
You may have heard that your website needs a meta title. However, if you have a title, you won’t need a meta title. So the next thing you will need is a meta description. A meta description is a paragraph of about 150-170 characters that describes your site. Your meta description will have a lot more keyword phrases than your title. And this description does not actually appear on your website like the title does.
*Please note that you will need different keyword phrases, titles, and meta descriptions for each page of your website. So if you have a home page, then a page for one of your books, then a page about you, they should all have different meta and title information.
Once you have decided on your title and meta information, you will need to put this information within the coding of your website. Some web-builders provide spaces for keyword phrases and meta description. If they do, then you don’t have to know the HTML code for adding them. Simply fill in the blanks.
But if your web-builder doesn’t have a space for these things, then you will have to add your own HTML. The HTML meta information goes in between your <head> </head> tags. If you are using a web-builder, then the site probably already has <head> </head> tags. If your web builder asks you to put in a title before you put in your content, it probably also has your <title> </title> tags. If that is the case, then all you need to add is your meta keywords and meta description.
If you are building your website through a web-builder, there should be a button or tab for HTML. Your HTML for meta information should look like this:
<meta name=”keywords” content=”add all your keyword phrases here with a comma in between each keyword phrase”>
<meta name=”description” content=”this is your meta description paragraph as described above”>
If you are not using a web-builder, then your HTML should look like this:
<head>
<title>put your title here</title>
<meta name=”keywords” content=”add all your keyword phrases here with a comma in between each keyword phrase”>
<meta name=”description” content=”this is your meta description paragraph as described above”>
</head>
Your title will appear on your website but your keywords and description will not. Feel free, however, to use your description in the web content of your website. You can re-word it a bit so that it is not exact but be sure you use your keyword phrases.
If you have more questions about how to add meta tags to your site, Google “meta tags” or “html meta tags” to find other sites who provide this information. I, admittedly, am an amateur when it comes to web building so I can only tell you a little bit about meta tags.