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

Understanding Meta Tags and Keywords - Your Roadmap Guide to Search Engine Success

What Are Meta Tags?

Quite simply, Meta Tags are a bunch of code located invisibly at the top or 'header' of your website pages. They include vital information about your page for the search engine robots that sweep the internet regularly. This information is stored in their database, ready to be queried by the search engine user.

That information consists of page title, description, target keywords, page author, subject, language and other techie details too. Now there have been some idiots in the internet marketing niche posting in forums, saying that the Meta tags are not important. In fact they are important, because you want TARGETED traffic to your site for free, right?

Now Google used to rely solely on the Meta tags. But nowadays, the Googlebots also parse the paragraphs text for target keywords, including page headers for relevance. But too many keywords in the content are bad, so don't over-do it.

The Structure of the Meta Tag Code in Page Header

Now, non techies may feel overwhelmed when viewing a page of HTML code. Yes, I can look daunting at the start. But for now, all you need to be focussing on for now is the "header" section, the first section of the web page at the top. Now I assume you have designed your page in an HTML editor. So in your editor, switch over to code view then look at the code between the HEAD and /HEAD tags.

Here's a bare bones example:

title PAGE TITLE /title

META NAME="Reply-to" CONTENT="youATmyemail.com"

META NAME="Author" CONTENT="Your Name"

META NAME="Subject" CONTENT="SUBJECT"

META NAME="Description" CONTENT="SHORT DESCRIPTION"

META NAME="Keywords" CONTENT="KEYWORD1,KEYWORD2,etc"

META NAME="Language" CONTENT="English"

META NAME="Revisit-after" CONTENT="15 days"

META NAME="Distribution" CONTENT="GLOBAL"

META NAME="Robots" CONTENT="All"

META NAME="Rating" CONTENT="GENERAL"

META NAME="Classification" CONTENT="Internet Marketing"

Now let's take a look at the most important ones in more detail:

PAGE TITLE

The title should contain your top keyword and if possible some secondary keywords. Don't overdo it here, but make it attract eyeballs from the search engine listings.

META NAME="Reply-to" CONTENT="youATmyemail.com"

This is where you assign the email address you wish to use for site visitor contact. You should never have your email address among site body content, because the spam spider harvesters will grab it and begin sending you tons of spam.

META NAME="Author" CONTENT="Your Name"

Just enter your name here. If someone searches Google using your name, they'll find you more easily. Now if you're a black hatter, you won't be putting your contact details in your Meta tags or page content, as well as on domain name registration. I don't condone black hat SEO methods because they don't work in the long run, because people are more savvy these days and will compare details of your site with WHOIS database.

META NAME="Subject" CONTENT="SUBJECT"

The subject of your web page. Be specific here - must relate to content.

META NAME="Description" CONTENT="SHORT DESCRIPTION"

This one is important as it will show up in the search engines below your page title link. Include your main keywords, your top 3 or 4. It should make sense and include a benefit that your webpage can provide.

META NAME="Keywords" CONTENT="KEYWORD1,KEYWORD2,etc"

First go to the free Google Keyword Research tool, enter in your main keyword or keyword phrase. A list of 50 will appear. Now to get the most searched for keywords, click on the top of the 'Global Monthly Searches' column to arrange the results from top to bottom in order of highest searches. Now select the top 10 and copy/paste into notepad. Also note a few other keywords your prospective visitors may type in.

Don't go overboard here, about ten or so targeted words is sufficient.

META NAME="Language" CONTENT="English"

Only change this if your website is for a non English speaking country.

META NAME="Revisit-after" CONTENT="15 days"

Tells the Googlebots to re-spider your site twice a month. Set this to whatever suits you best. If you update your site daily, set this to 1 day, and so on.

META NAME="Distribution" CONTENT="GLOBAL"

Keep this one to distribute globally. Again, only change this if your site is country specific.

META NAME="Robots" CONTENT="All"

This tells the robots whether or not to index the page. "All" will index everything, while "No-Follow" will block the robot software adding your site to the search engine database. Do this if your page is for a private group.

META NAME="Rating" CONTENT="GENERAL"

Set to GENERAL so it's open to all eyeballs, old and young. If it's an adult based site, change this to ADULT

META NAME="Classification" CONTENT="Internet Marketing"

The top level category for your web pages. Choose wisely.

That just about covers all the main Meta tag information you'll need to have you site up and ready for info hungry search engine visitors.

All the Best,

Neil Harland - Author

A Toolkit for the Non-techies - Instant Meta Tag Creator - Free
When you sign up for the Free Software Empire Package
Visit: http://www.codewareonline.com

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

SEO Tips to Improve Your Rankings

I would like to share with you a few tips to make your site SEO friendly and to score better with no minimum SEO skills on your end. Positioning on search engines can rely exclusively but not wholly to a few critical factors known as onsite (internal SEO) and offsite (external SEO). Internal SEO can be all the content your website contains from navigation building, text, images, layout, structure and more) Below are a few factors that can help your site to score better with no minimum SEO skills on your end.

Keyword selection and research

Take all the time available to research for all your keywords and phrases to use for your SEO campaign; keywords that best describes your area of business, products/services you are trying to promote.

Amount of text per page

Search Engines love pages with a broad content. A website with a long text content and information is in a good chance to get a better ranking than a competitor website with poor content. It is best advised that you can increase your content and text up to 2000 words per page. Write as much as you can about your business, services and use at least 3-4 times the keywords that you are targeting.

Keyword Density

Keyword density is a combination of the number of times a keyword or a phrase appears on your page. The more times the keyword is repeated on your page, the more will its density will be. In a 100 word content, a keyword that repeats 6 times counts 6% in density. The less the density is means that search engine will ignore the term in a search on the particular keyword or phrase. It is best advised to keep your keyword density between 5-7%. Anything over can flag as spam, best known as keyword stuffing

Title and "Alt" Tags in images

When it comes to images used in your website, search engines do not have the ability to read images so it is very important to keep a clear and descriptive title on all your images used in your website, typically in a one sentence of 20-30 characters if possible.

Use text for navigation

As i previously said, search engines do not have the ability to read image content to your website. If your navigation menu consists of images for any reason, search engines will not be able to index the text used on images and it's links. It is best advised to build your navigation with text links instead of pictures.

Use a Breadcrumb Trail (Internal Navigation) for every page created

Breadcrumb Trail is a navigation aid that gives users a way to keep track of their location within a website. Using Breadcrumb trails on all pages is a clearcut, standardized way of backtracking from any page, back to the homepage or reversed. You follow the breadcrumb trail back home, so to speak. This is a great way of "explaining" your site structure to Google and other search engines. A breadcrumb Trail helps to keep your website well organized and structured to search engines

Choose a keyword rich domain to use for your website

Choosing a keyword rich domain related to your targeted keywords can be another significant and important tip to achieve better rankings on search engines. Search engines tend to trigger keywords used in your metatags (keywords,description,title) but also in your domain used for your website as well. Go and search for a term or keyword in Google or any other search engine and you will notice that some of your results are triggered exclusively on their domains used rather than their description and titles instead.

Header Tags

Header tags are heading tags in HTML that search engines pay critical attention to them. There are 6 predifined headings, ranging from to which tells a visitor and search engines the topic of the web page. It is best advised that you highlight your main titles and assign a header tag on each giving priority to your main title where H1 and H2 are the strongest and most significant header tags to use in SEO. It is also recommended that you use keywords in your headings for maximum visibility and exposure of your primary targeted keywords.

Avoid Hidden Text

Hidden text is when a text has a similar color to your background color and in result it is invisible to humans to see but visible to search spiders to read. Due to an increase use of hidden text by spammers to increase and boost their keyword triggers on a search, all major engines changed their policy when it comes to hidden text crawls. Consequently, the use of hidden text may result in banning your site from any search engine and should be avoided.

Andrew is an SEO expert and President of iTarget Media, an Orange County based SEO and Web Design Company.

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