Meta Tags



This is one of the most important things that you need to add to your site if you want any chance of getting a good ranking. Most search engines use these to determine how your site is displayed in the search results. The most important of the meta tags are the title, description, and keyword tags.

?Title Tag: This should be no more than 60 characters in length. Somewhere within the title text you should have the primary keyword that you are targeting as a description for your site.

?Description Tag: This tag should be no more than 150 characters in length. It should be rich with the keywords that you are targeting and contain a well-written general description of your site.

?Keyword Tag: This tag should be no more than 874 characters in length and not repeat the same word more than 3 times. The keywords should be separated with commas. Include common misspellings of keywords. Never use keywords that do not fit with your site, search engines will consider this spam and ban you. Instead of using individual keywords try instead to use keyphrases. Try to think of phrases that people will actually search for.

Example:

Instead Of Using:

web, design, tutorial, webmaster, tools, resources

Use:

web design tutorial, webmaster resources, webmaster tools

?Other Tags: There are a variety of other tags that you can use on your site. The only other one that I recommend is the robots tag. This tells the robots indexing your site to index your pages and follow your links.

Keyword Density

Keyword density is one factor with which many search engines rank your site. They index your entire page and then look at how frequently keywords appear. There is a fine line to be drawn when putting the keywords on your site. You want to put enough keywords on your site, but don't want to simply just list them as many search engines will consider this spamming and ban you. Do not write text on the same color background to try to increase density without your viewers being able to see it. This is blatant spamming and you will not be indexed and probably blacklisted.

Link Popularity

It has been a recent trend for search engines to rate your site based primarily on its link popularity. Link popularity is basically how many different sites contain links to you. I really recommend that you write other websites that cover similar topics as yours and ask for a reciprocal link exchange or possibly even start a special section on your site for these type of links. Google's Pagerank is a statistic that is derived primarily from your page rank. It takes into account both your incoming and outgoing links. In addition it is much more important to get few links from other sites with high page ranks than many with low page ranks. Keep in mind that it is very difficult and takes a lot of hard work to get a good page rank. Also be very weary when trying to 'trick' search engines. This is a very easy way to get banned for life!

Site Map

While often overlooked, having a site map on your site can really help to get your entire site indexed. Your goal is to get the search engine spider to your site map page. Since the site map is essentially a simple list of links, the spider can easily find and follow them, thus, indexing your entire site. Make sure the site map link is easy for the spider to find!

Robots.txt

This is a simple text file placed within the root directory of your website that spiders first look for prior to indexing your site. It basically tells them what to index and what not to index. For a sample of a robots.txt file allowing the engine to index all pages.

Alt Tag

All of your images should have alt tags. This will help search engine spiders find images that are links and follow them. In addition, if you put a short description in the alt tag you can use them to help beef up your keyword density.