MetaTag

Meta
Tags (Keyword and Description) and the Title Tag are an absolute essential
for any page to get top ranks in the search engines. In fact this
is a very important criterion the search engines take into consideration
before deciding to give rank to a page with respect to a keyword.


All the
advice given in the page will be useless if you do not know how to
know the most important and popular keywords for your site. If you
want to learn how to get the most important keywords for your site
- click here!

We discuss
them one by one.


The Meta
Keyword Tag:

The Meta
Keyword tag is written like this:

<META
NAME="Keywords" CONTENT="keyword1, keyword2, ….,
keywordX">

Where
keyword1, keyword2, …., keywordX are important keyword phrase
with respect to the site.

Note:
The Meta Keyword Tag is not displayed to the viewer while browsing.
It's there for certain technical reason. An explanation is beyond
the scope of this article, but know that it does help in search engine
ranking - therefore we are discussing it here!

Some
of the search engines ignore this tag, however it doesn't take much
on your part to include it. Search engines that give importance to
the Meta Keyword Tags look for it.

Punching
this tag with a lot of Keywords reduces the weight of this Tag. The
search engines might even ignore them. Also, repetition of the same
keyword more than twice is unnecessary. The best idea would be to
write the most important keyword in upper as well as lower case. For
example, "search engine optimization, search engine, SEARCH ENGINE
OPTIMIZATION".

Suppose
your site deals in online booking of hotel rooms in the US. You have
one page dedicated to hotels in Florida. You can write

<META
NAME="Keywords" CONTENT="hotels in florida, US Hotels,
Florida accommodation, US accommodations, HOTELS IN FLORIDA">

Note
that none of the keywords is repeated more than twice and somehow
we achieve the target of pushing the most important keywords. There
is no need to stuff this tag with a lot of keywords - even the search
engines that do recognize the Meta Keyword Tag will ignore them.

You can
repeat some very popular and important keywords in different pages
of your website. It does make your site stronger for that keyword.
Keep in mind not to include this keyword in any page that has absolutely
nothing to do with the meaning of the keyword. The index page is the
best example. Your index page is the most important page for the search
engines. Since the index page contains the general information of
your business/site you can include the most popular keywords here.
It's recommended you include the top 10 keywords in the index page.
Repeat these keywords in the respective page meant to target that
portion of your business. For example the index page could contain
the keyword "Hotels in Florida" and a page that is dedicated
to online booking/information in hotels in Florida could also contain
this keyword.

The Bottom
Line - even if not-so-important tag, do include the Keyword Meta Tags
in all of your web pages. No need to stuff this tag with a lot of
keywords.

I once
again repeat - if you do not know the most important keywords for
your site/business all your effort will go in vain. I recommend that
you read the page I have written on writing for the web using the
most important keywords. You can find it here!

The
Meta Description Tag:

The Meta
Description Tag is written like this:

<META
NAME="Description" CONTENT="Describe your site in a
single line here.">

Where
in the CONTENT part you write the description of your website in general
and the page in particular. Note that your description should not
exceed 20 words. Try to make it less than 20 words. Actually you can
write a long description but the search engines are too busy to check
what's written approximately after that many words, so anything after
20 words is ignored.

Note:
The Meta Description Tag too is not displayed to the viewer, but it
does help tremendously in search engine ranking. This tag is displayed
by most of the search engines in their search results. The surfers
read this sentence before they click on to visit your site. Imagine
the importance of this tag - a smart description can force a surfer
to click on it and a weak one may drive your traffic away!

These
20 odd words carry some serious weight as far as search engine placement
is concerned. Try to target the most important keywords within the
first 15 words. Your description should be a grammatically correct
sentence with no spell errors. Start your description with an upper
case letter (just as you would do to write a sentence) and end it
with a period. The more your target keyword is near to the beginning
of the sentence, the better.

An example:


Lets take the same travel agent site featuring online reservations
in the hotels in USA. The page that features accommodation in Florida
could include the following description:

<META
NAME="Description" CONTENT="Florida accommodation -
online reservation available with huge discount.">

The first
two words "Florida accommodation" is our important keyword.
The description begins with a popular keyword. Online reservation
is a general keyword and helps even if somebody types "Florida
accommodation online" or "online Florida accommodation".
Note that there is no other keyword 'diluting' the importance of the
keyword - Florida accommodation. Since this page we assume is dedicated
to Florida accommodation there is no need to push any other keyword.
Now, read the sentence. Any surfer interested in visiting Florida
would click on it.

The index
page can contain all the important keywords in its description, but
as said earlier do not exceed 20 words.

The Bottom
Line - no more than 20 words in a description; grammatically correct
sentence; no spelling mistakes; try to start with an important keyword;
only the first letter in upper case, of course nouns should begin
with upper case.

The Title
Tag is discussed here!

A
word of caution: Take ultimate precaution while writing the Meta
Tags. Follow each and every advice given here seriously as things
are getting tough. A small mistake may cause non repairable damage
to your website. Once penalized for whatsoever reason by the search
engines - take this - there is no way your site get indexed again.
Then there is only one way out - buy another domain and shift your
site to the new domain. And try your luck again.

Since
this is an extremely painful measure - a domain name has a lot of
importance, losing it may mean losing your business - we recommend
that you pay a little for it and get the job done by us. You can click
here for our search engine ranking services.

I know
a tool that will help you to know the popular keywords you should
use while writing meta tags - Description and Title. Its called WordTracker.
WordTracker maintains a database of very popular words people are
using in the search engines to search. Popularity of a word is taken
into account as to how many times that particular word was typed in
search engines to search. The more it was typed to search, the more
is its count. A count of 1 means it was typed at least once in the
last 300 million searches done on the Internet. The words with high
count can be used in the meta tags as well as the content of your
webpage to get a top rank in the search engines. It's a very
easy to use tool. You can guess a single word and this tool will display
its popularity as well as popularity of relevant words that can be
used in the meta tags. You should use the most popular words in
the Meta Tags. They do have a trial version running on
the net. I suggest you visit the site to know more. Click
here to visit the site.