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.
NEW
job
offers updates!
