SEO The Basics - Adding Meta Tags
By Tanner Brown • Mar 23rd, 2008 • Category: Business & MoneyOnce your page is found, and indexed with the “Big 3″ search engines, the next major step in search engine optimization is to work on your Title, Description, and Meta Tags. For those of you who don’t know, tags are information inserted into the “head” area of your web pages, not seen by those viewing your pages in browsers, but by the search engines themselves, to give the search engine an idea of the content on your page, so they can better match your page with relevant searches
The Title Tag, is information not seen on the page itself, but shows up at the very top of the Internet window, for example, this pages title is “SEO The Basics - Adding Meta Tags“. When a person makes a search on an engine such as Google, the search engine will first search the titles of the page, because the title is what the page will most likely be about. Your can be as short as you want, but its best to fit as much info into it as possible, but try to keep it under 60 characters. Search engines don’t like people to spam things like this and will often rank you poorly for a title that is too long.
Description Tags are just like title tags, only they are longer, and give you a more detailed description of what is in the page. When you make a search, the content that shows up underneath the link to the website is the description tag.
Meta Tags are basically key words in your content that give a search engine a good example of what your page is about. There is no perfect amount of keywords that you should put in, but I would say that you should try to keep it around 10 words or so, and keep each keyword/key phrase under 3 or 4 words.
Adding tags
Many web developing programs will allow you to enter your tags and it will automatically enter it into your HTML, but if you are making your page from scratch and doing all of your own HTML then this is how/where you enter the tag codes.
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Enter your pages Title here</TITLE>
<META name=”Description” content=”add your page’s description here”>
<META name=”Keywords” content=”add keywords here, separating each one with a comma”>
</HEAD>
Tips:
-Keywords that are bold in your content, or linked will rank better than just plain text.
-The goal is to pick keywords that are most frequently searched for, but have the least competition. There are many different programs you can use to decipher a keywords success, I like to use one called WEB CEO. It has many other tools as well but I most frequently use the keyword analysis tool.
-When a search engine crawls a page for a search, it looks through the webpage URL first, then the title, then the description, then the keywords, then the content to make a match for the search query, so that is the order of importance to a search engine.
-Try to make sure that your keywords also show up as much as possible in your content without spamming them. A search engine will see a keyword used a lot as a sign that the page it is indexing has a lot of info on that topic, so it will usually rank it high, but remember not to spam words.
- Don’t spam keywords! Lots of people will try to hide keywords out of sight from a page viewer and just write those keywords a hundred times, and search engines are smart and know whats going on, and will rank you poorly for this.
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Nice post!
Title and Meta Tags such as description and keywords are the easiest to optimize your page. So, it is essential in optimizing your website in order to drive traffic.
Thanks! What he says is right, its the easiest as well as the most effective. This is just a basic rundown on how all the tags work. I will go into more depth on this topic in the future