Back in the early days of SEO, it was all about meta tags. If you wanted to rank well for "pasta making," you could stuff your meta tags full of the phrase "pasta making" over and over and over again, and you'd start to rank well assuming all of your competitors weren't doing it.
Well, do you really think Google wouldn't catch on? Of course they did. And now meta tags are largely useless as an SEO tool as far as ranking is concerned. But that doesn't mean that they're useless when you're trying to optimize for search engines! Sounds contradictory, right? It's not. Read on.
Meta tags are the code in your webpages that are invisible to viewers unless they specifically go into their browser's option to show the page's source. (I can't paste samples here because HTML is stripped out of these articles, but you can look it up in HTML references.)
"This page is about pasta" name="description" />
"pasta making" name="keywords" />
"description" content="This page is about pasta" />
"keywords" content="pasta making" />
And let's throw in one more. It's not technically meta data, but I'm being creative here and taking you in a direction you didn't know I was going to go.
So like I said, stuffing keywords into the keywords meta tag really isn't going to get you anything. So really, you can toss that out. Put your keywords in there for the heck of it, but don't pay it much attention beyond that.
I'm really interested in two things:
1. The title tag
2. The description meta tag
Why? Because it's what viewers see when they finally do bring up your page in the listings. You do need to get in good with Google to get to the top of their listings for a keyword phrase.
But you need to get in good with the SEARCHER (the real person) if you actually want to get any clicks to your site. A lot of people forget there is actually a human involved.
Let's pretend you are trying to rank for "pasta making." So you put "pasta making" everywhere. You call the homepage of your site "pasta making" in the
Basic, brainless SEO, right? Repeat your phrase a lot. And if you've done it well, maybe you're #1 when people search for pasta making.
But thanks to your careless use of the title and description tags, here's what comes up in Google:
Pasta Making
pasta making - pasta making website for good pasta making
pastamakingsite.com/pasta-making/pasta-making-for-pasta-making.html - 50k - Cached - Similar pages
Congratulations. You have created the spamiest looking listing ever. Nobody's going to click that if they actually want information.
So do your SEO right, but then think of the person and how they'll see your site when they find it. Craft your title and description so it actually looks like a site worth visiting. You have to make them click for it to be worth a thing!
Need more help with SEO (including what meta tags are)? There's a lot more easy-to-follow, step-by-step, no-bull information at Make Money Online Without Hype [http://www.makemoneyonlinewithouthype.com].
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Grae_Yohe
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