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

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10 Tips To Improve Your Site's Search Engine Page Ranking

If you are a novice website owner and just getting your bearings together regarding the need to optimize your site for higher page ranking by Google and other search engines, this brief crash course on basic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques may be just what you are looking for. By generally following these tips you set the platform for higher page rank over time.

1. DOMAIN NAME: Try and name your domain name after your business. In other words, if you plan on selling bricks from your website you could name your site domain name ‘bricksrus.com” or “thebrickbusiness.com” …any name incorporating the word “brick” in the domain name will help search engines index your site and page ranking over time.

2. GOOD KEYWORD CONTENT: If you are designing your own HTML pages for your site, you probably already know that you need keyword rich text that uses keywords to describe your business, product or service. As mentioned above, if you are in the brick business, you could use words that describe your products like: “bricks, red bricks, cement bricks, cinder bricks, small bricks, large bricks, etc. By using the keyword “brick” you are helping search engines categorize your site and its relevance when somebody searches for “bricks” online. The use of the word “bricks” in your domain name and your home page content will help raise you up in the search queries. It takes time to get a good page rank and laying the proper foundation now will speed up the ranking process. One word of caution: Do not go over-board using keywords—you want to design your site for people AND search engines not just search engines. Be creative about using keywords so that your text flows, is informative to people and uses key words in a balanced manner.

3. SITE DESIGN: If you are using template based software for your website there is not much you can do to improve your site design except to make sure that all your site pages have a link back to the home page. A good place to place these links is at the bottom of each page, which say “home” so that when they are clicked they take you to your home page. The reason for doing this is when your site is crawled by search engine spiders each page is indexed. Over time each page will have a page ranking which, when linked back to your home page, will contribute those page ranks to the home page (similar to links from other sites). Long story short, it helps give your site relevancy to the search engines and this is helpful for new sites.

4. META TAGS: Meta page title tags and meta keyword description are not as important as they once were but it is important to know how to use them and to use them well. Page title tags is what describes each page on a website and appears across the top of your browser when clicking from page to page across the Internet. The page title tag should use the most important keywords that describe the page content and are relevant to your site. For example, a home page title could be changed from “index” to “ Bricksrus, Bricks, Bricks and More Bricks” … The point being that again the word brick is being used to help search engines understand your page and business. A keyword approach should be taken whenever possible.

5. USE ALT TAGS: Alt tags are HTML code that describes images appearing on your site. Search engines scan alt tags as they crawl through a web site and using alt tags is another great way to use keywords. Get the idea here? You want to keep building on your keywords. If you need help with HTML code, we have free info and manuals to show you how to get these things done. Just go to our site, and go to the Smart Link Zone, click on tech links and look around—you will find a TON of free information that will be very helpful to optimizing your site.

6. SITE PAGE CONTENT: The goal is to have a TON of quality pages on your site STUFFED with text content—the more pages the better. I question the value of spending time developing page content for a page rank. Instead, design your site to benefit visitors. If you want to build up your site content, you can do so quickly by downloading articles. Put articles like this one into your site by either directly publishing the article on your site OR use the RSS feed to import the article feed into your site. Once again, another technique to build page rank and relevancy.

7. DIRECT URL SUBMISSION: The best way to get your domain name URL registered with search engines is to take the time to manually register with the biggest and best search engines. Registering your site with Google is quick and easy, as are many other popular search engines. Be aware that some search engines want fee-payments before they will accept your site submission. My opinion is to avoid paying for site submission, it’s a racket. Registering with Google and the multitude of free search engine submission sites is the way to go. If you need links to free submissions search engines, go to our site, and go to the Smart Link Zone, click on tech links and look around—you will find a link page to over 25 free search engines.

8. LINK EXCHANGE: When you have a new site and little or no Google page rank, it can be difficult to get good sites to link to yours because it is basically a waste of their time to do so. Why does a company like Haliburton Corporation need to link to your bricksrus.com business? They don’t and they won’t in this example. The goal is to get sites with a high page rank to link to yours. What you can do to get your site URL listed on high page rank sites is to write articles (like this one) on QUALITY Ezine directories with Google page ranks over 5/10. Doing so puts your link on a quality site. For example, notice our link at the bottom of this article. When search engines scan this directory page they will see the SBS link pointing to our site. This helps with our page ranking. An added advantage is that articles like this are picked up and published by other sites which spreads our link all over the Internet with only the effort of writing the article. It’s good for the readers and website owners, like you, who are building content for their web site. It ‘s also beneficial to us because, as you read this article you are becoming familiar with SBS, and that is promoting our site to you, right? It’s a win-win situation for all.

9. REGISTER A SITE MAP: Develop a site map for your site if possible. This is a problem for many template-based-web site services that do not allow you to have direct access to the root directory of your domain. Why? Google requires that you upload an HTML key-code into your root directory to prove that you, in fact, own the domain name you are submitting a site map for. If you have access to your root directory of your site, by all means register a site map with Google, it will help with page rank. Again, we have easy to use site map generators in the tech section of our site as described in earlier paragraphs.

10. SEARCH OUT SEO SITES: There are a TON of search engine optimization sites online that will give you a lot of helpful information about getting your site ranking improved. We have taken the time to find the best for you and they appear, as with everything else related to this article, in our tech link section of the Smart Links Zone on our site. If this article has overwhelmed you with terminology, I suggest you visit SBS and look around, you will get a lot of free answers…. One additional thing: Download the free Google tool bar. It has a meter that shows Google page rank on a scale from 1 to 10 which will help you identify sites that are worthy of link exchange (at least 1/10).

To your unwavering success!

Copyright © 2006 James W. Hart, IV All Rights reserved

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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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SEO Meta Tags Do Work

SEO or search engine optimization is an ongoing battle for all of us, as we fight to have our web pages get higher ranking in the big search engines like Bing, Yahoo and of course Google. But did you know there are a few things that you can do on your site to not only increase ranking, but also ensure the people searching will click your site.

At the top of any websites or blogs source code Meta Tags if written well can help drive targeted traffic to your site. There are two main tags that webmasters should make sure to utilize when creating new web pages or posts for their site. The first is the description tag, this is a short introduction to your website or blog that will be placed under the title of your web page or blog post whenever your site comes up in the search engines results for a key word or phrase. Even if you manage to get your site ranked well it is essential that both the title and description tags will ensure your website gets clicked.

The second tag of important is the key word tag, this tag let you place words or phrases held with in your pages. Due to a phrase know as key word stuffing many search engines do not consider these tags as important as they did in the past but it can't hurt to add a few relevant words or phrases within this tag it may just help.

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Optimizing Your Site For Better Search Engine Ranking

SEO is the active practice of optimizing a web site by improving internal and external aspects in order to increase the traffic the site receives from search engines.

Search engine optimization is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results for targeted keywords. As a marketing strategy for increasing a site's relevance, SEO considers how search algorithms work and what people search for. Another class of techniques, known as black hat or spamdexing, use methods such as link farms and keyword stuffing that tend to harm search engine user experience. Some search engines have also reached out to the industry, and are frequent sponsors and guests at SEO conferences and seminars.

Many SEOs and other agencies and consultants provide useful services for website owners, from writing copy to giving advice on site architecture and helping to find relevant directories to which a site can be submitted. You should never have to link to an searche engine. Avoid marketers that talk about the power of "free-for-all" links, link popularity schemes, or submitting your site to thousands of search engines. Some marketers may try to sell you the ability to type keywords directly into the browser address bar.

The objective of Search Engine Optimization is to increase web visitor counts by ranking very high in the organic results of searches using the most appropriate keywords describing the content of your site.

Search engine can also target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines. They look for sites that employ these techniques and may remove them from their indexes.

Webmasters and content providers began optimizing sites for search engines in the mid-1990s, as the first search engines were cataloging the early Web. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) involves a combination of free website submissions and paid search engine listings, to ensure your website reaches customers using search engines to research purchase decisions. Search engines work for you non-stop 24/7. The answer is entirely dependent upon your web site's visibility amongst the search engines. The goal of web optimization is to create consistent and targeted traffic through search engines and directories to your web site. Search engine optimization is not just to rank in search engines but mainly to achieve a good click through rate from the targeted visitors. This means that your web site should come up in the search results of the search-engines with targeted keywords that are related to your content or theme of your site. If your web pages are dynamically created from the database, it's likely that many search engines have difficulty to crawl and index them. Disadvantage of dynamically created pages are that many search engines like Google for example don't like dynamically created pages because the crawlers might get in an infinite loop on your server if they follow dynamically created web pages with a query string in it.

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Optimizing Meta Tags to Increase Your Site's Visibility

Meta tags are added to a webpage to increase its visibility in the search engine. The Meta tags consist of three important components which are title, description and keyword. The title is the most commonly used Meta tag. It is displayed on top of the browser window. It acts as the title of the document. The Meta description is not shown on the browser but it is shown in the search result. The Meta description is often used in a webpage that does not contain text content. For example, in an art gallery site, the whole page displays only the picture. Since no text is placed on the site, you have to use the Meta description to optimize it with keywords. The Meta tags are usually added under the head tags. The Meta tags for each page should be unique. In this way, you can avoid duplication problem.

You should use a different Meta tags for each page in the website. The best keyword research tool for researching keyword is the Google AdWords keyword tool. The new Google AdWords keyword tool offers many improved functions. The keyword tool allows you to analyze a keyword based on the competition, number of searches, CPC and etc. The Meta keywords is the least important of all the Meta tags. Some people like to take advantage of the Meta keywords by spamming it with a huge list of keywords.

The Meta keywords should not exceed more than 255 characters. If the Meta keywords exceed 255 characters, it will be considered spam by the search engine. Your site may be blacklisted by the search engine as a spam site because of including too many keywords. You can use multiple word as one keyword. In order for the search engine to recognize a phrase as a single keyword, you have to use the comma. The most important keyword should be positioned in front followed by the less important keywords.

The title and description should be written properly so that people will be interested in viewing the web page. Sometimes, the search engine will display the Meta description in the search result if it couldn't find any keyword in the article. It is important to optimize the Meta title and description with keywords. By optimizing the Meta title and description, you will be able to rank well in the search engine. The keyword you use must have low competition. You should not use misspelled keywords in your Meta tag. Though misspelled keywords have small competition, it will drop your search engine ranking if you use it. The search engine knows that you are trying to manipulating it so it will never rank you. Using misspelled keyword also cause people to think that your site is unprofessional. When people see that your site is unprofessional, they will avoid it and won't consider buying your product. In addition, the keyword phrase you use must be meaningful. If the keyword phrase is not meaningful, the search engine will consider you as a spammer.

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