Thursday, January 5, 2012

Meta Tags and Keywords: Why They Are Important

Having good meta tags and keywords on a website will determine your level of exposure to search engines and audiences.
What are meta tags?

Meta tags are an HTML element that's added to the header of your page. This is generally what will come up when someone is searching for your site. Meta tags keywords are specific keywords that will guide search engines to pull up your site. The header also has a meta description field which is a 1 to 2 sentence description about your site. This is generally the description that comes up during a search result.

Meta tag Description

Meta tag keywords and meta tag description are coded like the following:

Poor meta tags and meta tag descriptions will lead to low visibility of your site. Remember though, meta tags are not the only defining factor of your site's success. Also do not go keyword frenzy on this either. It's best to limit your meta keywords to no more than 10. Most search engines, especially Google, are smart enough to not accept meta keywords anymore but rather just use your meta keywords as a reference to what your site may be about. Meta keywords are still important, but are not the defining role in a website's marketing anymore.

How To Choose Great Meta tag Keywords

To determine what keywords to use, you must first determine, what people would put into search engines that should bring up your site. For example, if you hosted a site that was based on the iPhone, you might choose keywords like "Apple", "iPhone", or "Steve Jobs", words that would ultimately lead the user to your site.

Also don't limit yourself to just words. Use key phrases as well. If you had a Martial Arts site, you might choose phrases like "Self Defense" and "Hand to Hand Combat".

Find Resources On The Web

The internet has a billion places that could help you with your keyword choosing. For example, you could browse upon a site similar to yours and determine what keywords they used that they think were successful and you could use similar ones. After all keywords are not patented.

One great tool to use is to use Google's keyword generator that they use for the AdWords site. Http://adwords.google.com is an application for businesses to advertise on Google, and in doing so, Google provides to them a huge list of keywords that may relate to your site. You may take this and extract a few important keywords from their list to add to your meta tag. Be sure not to choose too broad of keywords as it may have very little to no effect. If you own a restaurant website, you may not want to choose "food" as one of your keywords.

Once you have your keywords chosen, add them to your site within the header tags. You may want to do this for each page, to ensure full possible visibility. You may even want to choose different keywords for different pages if there's a clear enough line of differentiability.

Nero Nguyen
Engineer of Success
blog.neronguyen.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Nero_N



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