Articles - Meta tags
and Zen
If you aren't utilizing Meta Tags in your web site's pages, you
may be missing out on valuable traffic and therefore paying
customers!
Meta tags are the sections of your HTML that provide direction and
information for search engine robots. To get the best rankings
possible in some search engines, be sure to use meta tags in every
web page. Meta tags are not viewable to Internet users unless they
examine the source code of your pages.
Unfortunately, many site owners have abused Meta tag usage and a
number of major search engines no longer use them as a means of
ranking sites. Although this may be the case, it is still
important to have Meta tag statements to cover as many bases as
possible.
The process of Meta tag development is fast becoming a science,
and this document is only a primer. Mathematical formulas are now
in common use for developing keyword statements.
Copyright issues
Remember that Meta tags, like all other material on the
Internet is bound by copyright (whether a copyright notice is
utilized or not). Be careful not to copy and paste another persons
tags directly into your code without some heavy revising. People
have been prosecuted for doing so.
Meta Tag statement example
<META NAME="value" CONTENT="comments">
Be sure that your syntax is correct, otherwise your hours of work
may be totally wasted (I speak from experience).
Meta tags reside between the <HEAD> and </HEAD> tags of your
document.
The most important tags:-
----------------------
Keywords Meta Tag:
Example:
<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="metatags,keywords,description,definition">
This should be a comma separated list of relevant words for the
search engines to index your page. These words should reflect your
site's most important theme. Be careful not to repeat the same
keyword too often - 3 occurrences is a safe benchmark and this
includes word variations. Some engines perceive heavy repetition
to be "spamming the index".
Do not use words that are not relevant to your site. Many search
engines will blacklist you if you do. Phrases such as "meta tag
definition," are considered one keyword. When surfers enter
queries into search engines, they will utilize phrases to help
narrow down results. So think about the phrases that you would use
if you were looking for subject material such as your site has to
offer.
Keep your most important keywords and phrases within the first 100
characters of this statement.
Capitalization is not so much an issue as most Internet users tend
to use lowercase text when submitting queries, but it may be a
consideration when it comes to locality names. This is a difficult
aspect to judge as some search engines do not distinguish between
uppercase and lowercase and it is easy to go over the 3 word limit
by using such variations.
Some search engine optimization professionals use commas between
keywords and keyphrases, but others recommend against this
practice as it takes up valuable space. As with a number of search
engine optimization topics, this is hotly debated so you may wish
to experiment.
Wherever possible, try and use a different keyword statement on
each page.
Recommended length of 500-750 characters.
----------------------
Description Meta Tag:
Example:
<META NAME="description" CONTENT="A human readable description of
your site. This will appear in the search engine results query">
The page description is usually produced along with the page title
in the results pages (SERPs) of a search engine query. Some search
engines use the first few lines of text on a page as a description
if this tag is absent, so also ensure that paragraph one of your
page is relevant.
As with the Keywords Meta Tag, be careful not to repeat terms too
often to avoid rankings being penalized. This tag is not only used
for search engine spiders, but also may be the text that appears
as a result of an Internet user's search engine query. Here is the
challenge - to create a description meta tag that not only is
attractive to robots, but also to humans.
Keep your most important terms at the beginning of each
description meta tag statement and try to have a different
relevant statement for each page of your web site.
Recommended length of 170-200 characters
----------------------
Content-Type Meta Tag:
Example:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=charset=iso-8859-5">
Netscape uses a META tag to automatically switch fonts, but most
other browsers will ignore it. The default HTML charset is
ISO-8859-1 (Western European 8-bit).
This Meta tag is usually automatically generated by your web
development software package.
---------------------
Robots Meta Tag
Example:
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="ALL,NONE,NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW">
default = "ALL"
"NONE" = "NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW"
This tag is meant to help webmasters who cannot control the
robots.txt file at their sites. It provides a final attempt to
keep their certain pages out of search engines and other web
utilities to protect sensitive content or "under construction"
pages. (Note, as mentioned in a previous article, if you are using
a robots.txt file, please ensure that it is not empty. Some bots
interpret this NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW for the entire site!
INDEX means that robots are able to include this page in search
engines.
FOLLOW means that robots are able to follow links (spidering).
A value of "NOINDEX" allows links from the page to be spidered,
even though the page itself is not indexed. A value of "NOFOLLOW"
allows the page to be indexed, but no links from the page are
spidered. A value of "NONE" tells the robot to ignore the page.
There are a number of other Meta tags that can be also
implemented, but it is probably wiser to invest your time in
optimizing your description and keywords tags.
Further learning resources:
Search engine marketing tutorials
Title
Tag Guidelines
The importance of anchor text
Michael Bloch
Taming the Beast
http://www.tamingthebeast.net
Tutorials, web content, tools and software.
Web Marketing, Internet Development & Ecommerce Resources
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