Meta
tags like title tags are tags which are embedded in the HTML of a page,
they also appear at the top of a HTML page. However they are not as
important as title tags because only a handful of search engines use
them as a relevancy factor, but they still MUST be included in all your
webpages 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 keywords tag:
<meta
name="keywords" content="Internet Marketing Articles,Online
Marketing tips, strategies, Internet marketing tricks, secrets,website
promotion">
<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>
Lets
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.
Search
engines all differ when its comes to this tag, but they all seen 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 that 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. Also don't repeat
a word more than 3-5 times in your tag because most search engines nowadays
will see this a spamming.
The
reason that the meta keywords tag is not widely used by search engines
is because the text in these tags cannot be seen by visitors to a website.
And the search engines feel these tags will be abused, by webmasters
placing lots of unrelated words in them in order the get more visitors.
However
using the keywords tag in conjunction with other areas of your page
can help your ranking. For example if you 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. But will help to reassure search engines that a page is relevant.
As
for the meta description tag, this is what some search engines use when
your site is return in results for a certain search term. Without it
search engines could take the first few lines of code from your page.
So 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.
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. Bottom Line
- Description tags will be read by searchers make sure it doesn't sound
unprofessional or just plain stupid. Click NEXT to continue onto search
engine optimization page four.
Article by David Callan - admin@akamarketing.com
David is the webmaster of http://www.akamarketing.com.
Visit his site for free internet marketing articles, advice, ebooks,
news and lots more.
