Optimizing Your Meta Tags for SEO

Meta tags are special HTML tags that do not modify the look of the webpage, but provide the search engines with information about the webpage. There are some attributes of the Meta tags that are super important and some that are not. You should include Meta tags on each and every page of your website, so that search engines can index those pages easier. Google does not require you to place Meta tags on your site, but some search engines will rank you higher if you do. While Google does account for over 60 percent of all search traffic on the internet, the other search engines still count for at least 40 percent. If you are looking for traffic, then every qualified visitor counts. It does not matter if a sale came from Google's traffic or Yahoo's. Also, why rely on just 60 percent when you can rely on closer to 100 percent, and Google will rank you slightly higher for having your Meta tags match your webpage's content.

Format of the Meta Tag

I will dissect a Meta tag and its attributes so that we can get a better understanding of what a Meta tags does for a website. If we look at the attributes of the Meta tag, then some may apply to the website and some may not. In order to make your Meta tags you need to decide what your page is about. It is not enough to just decide on a title. You need to pick keywords that best describe your content. Your keywords need to be descriptive of the content, or if you have not written the content yet, your content should be about the keywords. There are many aspects to keywords, and this part of your SEO could literally take months if you are not careful. For simplicity, I will give a quick method of choosing keywords. This is not in full detail, but it should help.

What is a Keyword?

Keywords are words or phrases that a searching party types into a search engine's search bar. If you did a search for golden eggs, then golden eggs would be the keyword. If you want to make sure you are writing articles that will be both useful to the reader and useful monetarily to you, then you need to do some keyword research. Simply go to the Google Keyword Research tool and type your keywords into the space provided. The results could be around 800 keywords, and you can manipulate the output for the desired information. You should look for keywords that have over 2000 global searches. Once you find a keyword that passes the global searches, then you need to click the keyword to do a Google search on them. You are searching these keywords to see the page ranks of the competing pages. You will need a tool bar to see the page ranks of the search results. A really good and free tool bar is made by SEO Book called the "SEO Toolbar." Just install the toolbar and you will be able to find a lot of the information you will need for your optimizations. Now when you do your searches on the keyword results in the Google Keyword Tool you will notice a lot of new information appended to some of the search results. That is information about the website's traffic, links and page rank. Just click the "?" next to the information you want and it should appear in its place. If the appended information is not there, then you simply open each page to see its page rank in the toolbar. SEO Book has extensive information about how to use their product, so I will limit my explanation. You are trying to find the page ranks of the top ten web pages that Google has on the keyword. If all ten pages are a page rank of 4 or higher and use the exact keyword in their content then you will want to find a less difficult keyword. There is a whole bunch more information on keyword research than this, but this will help you get started.

Here is some sample Meta tags:

< title >Optimizing Your Meta Tags for SEO< /title >

< meta name="description" content="Internet Marketing is easier to do if you plan for SEO. Optimizing your Meta tags for SEO can be confusing. " >

< meta name="author" content="Charles Ross" >

< meta name="copyright" content="Universal-Marketer Inc." >

< meta name="keyphrases" content="Internet Marketing, Optimizing your meta tags for SEO, Search Engine Optimization with Meta tags" >

The above is a group of five Meta tags that could be located in between the head tags on a page that hosts this article. Let us look at each one.

1. Title- This is the title that is in the top bar of the browser. You should try to fit your keywords in the title. You should limit your titles to around 64 or less characters in length. Keep it to the point. Do not try to just stuff words in the title.
2. Description- This is what people see under the hypertext results when they search for something. You should use your keywords in complete sentences to provide your description. This will allow you to prove to the reader that you have what they are looking for too. You want to keep your description to around 155 or less characters, and you want to use your keywords in them.
3. Author and Copyright- This is just to help protect your copyright, but it may also help with branding your name too. It is not necessary though.
4. Keyphrases- This is the plural of keywords. You will not want to put just one word keywords in your Meta tag, so you simply use the "keyphrases" attribute to allow you to place your keyword phrases into the Meta tag.

Those Meta tags are what I consider the most important, but there are some optional ones that may be of interest to you.

Examples of the optional ones to consider are:

< meta name="googlebot" content="follow,index" >

< meta name="robots" content="all" >

< meta name="revisit-after" content="1 days" >

Here is the listing for the above tags:

1. googlebot- This instructs the googlebot what to do when it reaches your site. You only use this if you just want to talk to the googlebot and not the other robots.
2. robots- This is the same as googlebot except it is for all the robots and crawlers not just Google's.
3. revisit-after- This is the frequency that you want the robots to crawl your site. If you are adding stuff daily then you want it to set "1 days" to the attribute. But if it you only add stuff weekly then "7 days" or "1 weeks" will do.

You will use these only if you want to tell the search engines what to do when they come to your website. If these tags are not used then the default is that the googlebot and robots tags are set to "all" and the "revisit-after" tag is set to 1 month or what ever the search engine has them set to.

There are still many more Meta tags you can use on your website, but the ones that I have provided will work in most cases. You can find the other Meta tags by doing a search for "full list Meta tags" or something of that nature. You should now be on your way to a good foundation for the SEO of your site.

Hello my name is Charles Ross. I am a full time internet marketer. I have been studying internet marketing off and on for years. I have seen many opportunities come and go right before my eyes. I have watched the internet grow into a teenager. I have sat on the side lines for far too long. I have decided it is time for me to seek out the truth, so I am dedicating my site Universal-Marketer to finding the Truth About Internet Marketing.

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