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Meta Tag Optimization
Are Meta Tags are the magic solution to ranking well?No, but meta tags are not dead either. MSN still uses meta tag optimization for ranking criteria. This article will discuss how to benefit from meta tag optimization, and which search engines to use meta tag optimization for.
Meta tags are parts of an HTML document that are used for you to describe the page content for search engines. Meta tags are placed within the head area of an HTML file and with the exception of the Title tag; your visitors do not see them as part of the viewable area of the page.
How to write meta tags correctly.
<HEAD>
<TITLE>The title of this page</TITLE>
<META NAME="Description" CONTENT="The description.">
<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="keyword one, two, etc.">
<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="index,follow">
</HEAD>
The primary reason meta tag optimization is considered important in search engine positioning is that you have some ability to influence how your pages are described, categorized and indexed by various search engines and increase your website traffic.Creating the perfect Meta tags does not mean you will get top rankings many search engines such as google do not even consider meta tags for ranking criteria
Most Crawler-based search engines have the ability to utilize the Meta tags; however, not all of them do so. This stems from many years of site owners overstuffing their websites with keywords.Fast,HotBot,Alltheweb,and MSN use the description meta tag and portions of the keyword meta tags;therefore these two should have priority when implementing meta tag optimization.
What search engines use the title tag?Most search engines base alot of weight on your Title Tag because it explains the theme of your website .When creating the title for each page you need to combine your most important keywords with text that clearly describes your web page.The title should not just be keywords,but inviting to catch the attnetion of web surfer.
Keep keyword density of 20-35%. Example: Your keyword is "Shoes". Your title could be: "Buy Shoes at The Shoes Company" and since we used shoes twice within 6 words the density is 33%. The more keywords you target,the less density they will have,we recommend no more than two.
Create a title that is between 6 and 12 words. Each search engine has different allowable character values for the title area. In any case, a good rule of thumb is no more than 64 characters,otherwise your heading will not be entirely displayed,so keep this in mind when optimizing this meta tag
The description meta tag is supported by many major search engines: AltaVista, AllTheWeb and Teoma make most use of the tag. Google ignores the Meta description tag completely using the page content to create a description. MSN seems to combine part of the description tags with page content. DMOZ and other human edited directories do not use the description meta tags.
Guidelines to writing a good Meta description tag:
Limit the total description to approximately 200 to 250 characters. Although some search engines may support more when indexing the page, they may only display a smaller quantity of characters.
Use at least one of your keywords near the beginning of the description.
Using 12 to 24 words total (and not exceeding the character limit) seems to be a good range for most search engines.
The Meta Keyword Tag
The Meta keyword tag allows you to list the keywords for the page; however, most search engines do not support this tag.
What search engines use the Meta Keywords Tag? Of the major search engines: Inktomi and Teoma are the few that even take this tag into consideration.
Guidelines to writing a good Meta Keyword tag:
List the primary keywords that pertain to this page.
Put the most important words at the beginning of the tag.
If you don't use your keywords within the viewable text of the page, then just adding them to the Meta keywords tag is very unlikely to help with rankings for those keywords. However, some use the Meta Keyword tag as a place to put alternatives or misspellings of their keywords even though they are not on the viewable text. It is not clear whether this helps or not, but it won’t hurt.
Don't use this tag to “stuff” or repeat keywords. This doesn't help and could hurt with some search engines.
The optimal number of keywords should be between 7 and 48 words.
The Meta Robots Tag
The Meta Robots tag allows you to control whether or not you want the page to be indexed by search engines. By default, search engine spiders (crawlers) will try to index every page and follow links from one page to the next. The best use of the Meta robots tag is when you want to keep the search engine spiders OUT and not let them index a page.
Guidelines to writing a Meta Robots tag:
Make certain you double and triple check your code when using this tag. Improperly formatted tags or the wrong usage could keep search engines from indexing your pages or even your entire web site.
If you use robots.txt file to block search engine spiders, you do not need to use the Meta robots tag.
If you want the search engines to index your site, you really don't need to use the tag.
Always place it in the head of the document.
Examples of proper formatting:
<meta name="robots" content="index,follow">
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow">
<meta name="robots" content="index,nofollow">
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">
Translation:
Index this page and follow all the links to other pages.
DO NOT Index this page but follow all the links to other pages.
Index this page but DO NOT follow the links to other pages.
DO NOT Index this page AND DO NOT follow all the links to other pages.
Note: Never put more than one Meta robot tag on the page or more than one directive in the content area of the tag.
Other Meta Tags
There are many other Meta tags besides the ones we've discussed, however, none of them will improve your search engine ranking. Some are for internal search methods and some (such as the revisit tag) have no effect with search engines. In fact, meta tags like the "refresh" tag have been used to "trick" search engine spiders and are now regarded as something that could hurt your ranking with some search engines.
Summary: What Meta tags are important for optimization?
The Title Tag: Is very important and has full support
The Meta Description: Is important and has wide support
The Meta Keyword Tag: Is of low importance and has limited support
The Meta Robots Tag: Is only important if you don't want pages indexed.
Other Meta Tags: Are not important in search engine ranking.
The Bottom Line
In conclusion, writing good Meta tags are only one small part of optimizing your pages for higher positioning. This can be evidenced by the fact that there are many pages in the search engine indexes that rank high without even having Meta tags at all. Having good content and using the correct keywords within your content is far more essential. Once you have good content, focus your attention on no more than three keywords per page and then use those words in the title, Meta tags and repeatedly in the viewable text on the page.This will definitely improve your rankings using this meta tag optimization technique.
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