2003 Guide To Website Optimization

Using Meta Tags will increase your visibility in search engine results and will bring you added traffic from people searching for your specific product. This guide will help you become familiar with Meta Tags and will show you some little know tricks in order to make your meta tags more effective.

META TAGS EXPLAINED

META tags are HTML Tags that describe the contents of a web page. The primary purpose of Meta tags is to help catalog and categorize the contents of a web page. If your pages do not contain them then they may not get categorized well by the search engines.

Meta tags are used because they help web pages get better rankings on the search engines. They also allow the web site creator to write the description the search engines will show, specify keywords that search engines will use to find your site, and also a lot more information which helps search engines better find and rank your web site.

I recommend that you at least include the 'Description', 'Keyword' and 'Robots' tags. Also the 'Title' of your page plays an important role in helping search engines (and visitors) to determine the content of your site.Only 25% of sites use meta tags, but most search engines evaluate META tags when they rank your site.

Let's look at how meta tags are properly placed in your page, the example below uses the most commonly used attributes.

Description

Keywords

Robots

Revisit

Meta Data Example. Insert your Meta data between your HEAD Tags as shown below:










DESCRIPTION META TAG

Example:


The description tag gives the search engine the description that you want for your web site. If you don't have description tag, the robots will simply choose the first couple hundred words on your page and create its own description.

Your main goal with the description is to make it appealing to a human. This text is what's going to convince them to click your listing, so think carefully about it. Also, make sure you have a different description for each page on your site.

Quick Tips:

An ideal description should be somewhere within 150 to 200 characters, which correctly describes the content of the page.

Keep the words consistent between your description and keyword tags.

Avoid sentences such as: The best site on the web…

KEYWORD META TAG

Example:


Search engines will often use the keywords found on your pages as the primary source to categorize your website based on the search engines indexing algorithms (proprietary algorithms which index your website in search engine databases).

Be sure you choose keywords that are the most relevant to your site and avoid excessive repetition as many search engines will penalize your rankings for attempting to abuse their system. Similar to the Description META Tag, search engines give priority to the first few words in your description, so focus on your main keywords and then elaborate further by using synonyms or other related words.

Quick Tips:

Be specific. Usually, two-word and three-word phrases work better than single words.

When creating your keywords list, place the version of the keyword that your site visitors use the most at the beginning of your keyword list.

Since some keywords are commonly misspelled (such as the word "millennium"), you might want to put a misspelled keyword in your meta-tags. However, if that misspelled word does not appear in your main body text, this strategy is a waste of time. Search engines use both keyword frequency and keyword placement in their algorithms. If you are putting a misspelled keyword in only one place (i.e., your meta-tag keywords attribute), it's not helping your web page's relevancy because the keyword concentration for that one word is practically non-existent.

ROBOTS META TAG

Example:


The content of the Robots META tag contains directives separated by commas. Search engines send out what are called robots, crawlers or spiders to visit your site and gather web pages. The above defined directives are INDEX and FOLLOW. The INDEX directive specifies that an indexing robot should index the page, or add it as a search engine listing. The FOLLOW directive specifies that a robot is to follow links on the page.

REVISIT META TAG

Example:


The revisit meta tag defines how often a search engine should return to your site to re-index it. This is commonly used on web sites that are frequently updated. Possible values can be any amount of time you want: "30 days", "3 months" "1 week".

This covers the most common meta tags, however, there are also a number of additional tags which can be used in conjunction with your meta tags in order to increase your keyword relevancy, let's look at the most common tags.

TITLE TAG

Example:


Although not an actual meta tag, the