Search Engine
Optimization Guide - Part 3
by David CallanMeta Tags
Meta tags like title tags are tags which are embedded in the HTML
of a page. However they are not as important as title tags because
only a handful of search engines use them as a factor when
determining the relevancy of a page. They still must be included
in all your webpages however to get maximum results from the
search engines.
There are two types of meta tags which search engines look at, the
meta keywords tag and the meta description tag. Simply put the
keywords tag contains your keywords and keyphrases and the
description tag contains a keyphrase rich description of your
site.
Here's the HTML needed for the meta keywords tag.
<meta name="keywords" content="Internet
Marketing Articles, Online Marketing tips, strategies, Internet
marketing tricks, secrets, website promotion">
Now here's the HTML need for the meta description tag.
<meta name="description" content="AKA
Marketing for Internet Marketing Articles, also Online Marketing
strategies, tips, tricks and secrets">
Again these tags have to be included between the two head tags
<HEAD> </HEAD>
Let's start with the keywords tag, this is where you list words
and phrases related to your website theme. You will see above that
I have included my main keyphrase right at the start of the tag -
"Internet Marketing Articles", this is because some search engines
will see words that start early in the keywords tag as more
important than ones just before the end of the tag.
The search engines that use the meta keywords tag all differ when
it comes to this assigning relavency to words within the tag, but
they all seem to rate pages with short to medium length keywords
tag better, so I would suggest that you keep your keywords meta
tag between 150 to 250 characters.
I have a lot less than 250 characters in the example keywords tag
I give above this is because I do not want to dilute the
importance of "Internet Marketing Articles" by including lots of
words which I have not placed elsewhere on my page.
Don't repeat a word more than 3-5 times in your tag because most
search engines nowadays will see this a spamming and could
penalize you in the form of poor ranking or complete exclusion
from their database.
The reason that the keywords meta tag is not widely used by search
engines is because the text in this tag cannot be seen by visitors
to a website. Therefore the search engines feel this tag will be
abused, by webmasters placing lots of unrelated words within it in
order to get more visitors.
However using the keywords tag in conjunction with other areas of
your page can help your ranking. Imagine for example if your main
keyphrase was "Internet Marketing Articles" and someone typed in
that phrase in a search engine that supports meta tags. The search
engine would search its database, see that you have the keyphrase
"Internet Marketing Articles" in your title tag and a few times in
the body of your page, then it will take into account that you
have "Internet marketing articles" in your keywords tag too.
So alone keywords/keyphrases in a keywords meta tag will not give
you extra relevancy. It will however help to reassure search
engines that a page is relevant to the words being searched for.
Regarding the meta description tag, this is what some search
engines use when your site is returned in the results for a
certain search term. Without it search engines could take the
first few lines of code from your page, which mightn't appear so
good to the searcher. Hence you should always put a short 10-20
word description of your page in this tag. Make sure your most
important keywords are at the start of your description because
some search engines will truncate it to suit their own needs.
Don't stuff it with keywords, it's more important for the
description to sound right and professional than to have it filled
with keywords. Imagine doing a search for something and the site
ranked number 1 had a description filled with keywords. Would you
click on it? I wouldn't. The bottom line is that description tags
will be read by searchers so make sure it doesn't sound
unprofessional or just plain stupid.
Continue to Search Engine Optimization Guide -
Part 4
Article by David Callan. David is an Internet marketing
professional and webmaster of
http://www.akamarketing.com/webmaster-forums/. Visit his
webmaster forums for the latest discussions on search engines,
website authoring and Internet marketing related issues and
topics.
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