Want to improve
your ranking with search engines? All you need
to do is add a few "meta tags" to your
web pages, and you'll hit the top of the listings.
Meta Tags are information inserted
into the "head" area of your web pages.
Other than the title tag information in the head
area of your web pages is not seen by those viewing
your pages in browsers. Instead, meta information
in this area is used to communicate information
that a visitors may not be concerned with. Meta
tags, for example, can tell a browser what "character
set" to use and what content is displayed
on your pages.
Common types of meta
tags
In the example above, you can
see the beginning of the page's "head"
area as noted by the HEAD tag and ends with the
portion shown as /HEAD.
Meta
tags go in between the "opening"
and "closing" HEAD tags.
The Title Tag
The HTML title tag isn't really
a meta tag, but it's worth talking about in relation
to them. Whatever text you place in the title
tag will show up in the reverse bar of the visitors
browser when they view the web page.
The title tag is also used as
the words to describe your page when someone adds
it to their "Favorites" or "Bookmarks"
lists.
The title tag is crucial for
Search Engines. The text you use in the title
tag is one of the most important factors in how
a search engine may decide to rank your web page.
The Meta Description
Tag
The meta description tag allows you to influence
the description of your page in the crawlers that
support the tag (these are listed on the Search
Engine Features page).
Look back at the example
of a meta tag. See the first meta tag shown, the
one that says "name=description"? That's
the meta description tag. The text you want to
be shown as your description goes between the
quotation marks after the "content="
portion of the tag (generally, 200 to 250 characters
may be indexed, though only a smaller portion
of this amount may be displayed).
The Meta Keywords Tag
The meta keywords tag allows
you to provide additional text for crawler-based
search engines to index along with your body content.
The meta keywords tag is sometimes
useful as a way to reinforce the terms you think
a page is important for ON THE FEW CRAWLERS THAT
SUPPORT IT. For instance, if you had a page about
stamp collecting -- AND you say the words stamp
collecting at various places in your body copy
-- then mentioning the words "stamp collecting"
in the meta keywords tag MIGHT help boost your
page a bit higher for those words.
Even those who are experienced
in search engine optimization may decide it is
no longer worth using the tags. Search Engine
Watch doesn't. Any meta keywords tags you find
in the site were written in the past, when the
keywords tag was more important. There's no harm
in leaving up existing tags you may have written,
but going forward, writing new tags probably isn't
worth the trouble.
