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[M437]Meta Tags Search Engines

by David Fishman, Dav

When it comes to your Meta tags you want them to contain key information about your website as well as your top keywords. Make sure they keywords are in the title as well as in the body of the text. Make sure you write a description about your page using specific information and keywords, but keep it short and sweet.

All your keywords should always be relevant to the content within the page they describe. With the title tag, each search engine looks at it and uses it primarily the same way, to summarize and compile the websites contents for its search engine users. The how and where your keywords are in your title tag are the most important element with to which you can get benefit from using title tag. Choosing keywords is an essential part of producing a successful website.

When creating the title for the website makes sure you include keywords in the title that are on the page. There has been a lot of talk about title tags about how they are not important anymore, but in reality they are still important. On your page to properly place your title tag you should put it between the HEAD tags, one of the best place to include it is right after the HEAD tag.

Most of the SE use the meta title as the title of the page. When you do a search on search engines the title that is listed is the title on the website and sometime the Meta title is used. Once you understand why the title is so important, you can easily write more effective title tags. The title is so important because the first thing that a human searcher sees is the title. The Meta title is a critical factor in controlling where your site is listed in search engines.

In many results the Meta description will appear on the results page right under the title. The only caveat to remember is that your META description will only show if the search term is in the META description. Try to keep the title brief so it is not cut off in the results, it is best practice if you keep the description under 200 characters.. Your description contains your important key phrase and key words.

Place your description in the opening paragraph, if you do this the description is weighted heavier by search engines. Sometimes even google picks up description tag. Make sure that title and description is crafted neatly and attracts both visitors and search engines.

Bots have been spidering the web since the '90's, including pages into various collections. Pictures are worth 1000 words to you and me, but zero to a search engine. Even if you ensure you have completely relevant Meta Tags, some search engines will still ignore them. Always make sure that your meta tags do not have any line breaks. The more educated you are about what search engines are looking for, the better you will be able to respond and rise in the rankings.

If you only put the description in the Meta tag section, then the search engine robots will see it but many of your visitors will not. Don't hide this information in a place where your readers cannot see it. Meta tags are HTML elements used to provide structured metadata about a web page.

Using Meta tags is not some magic answer that everyone thinks it is. Meta Tags are most commonly used to distinguish the keywords that are relevant to a page's content. The robots do scan the Meta tags and some of the search engines will use the information from them. Meta tags are still important today, they might not be as important but you still need to use them if you want to compete with other sites.

I deal with many questions from curious website owners everyday. One question I have a new answer for is, "Should I use META tags on my site when do search engine optimization?" Old Answer: It couldn't hurt, but don't worry about them, the search engines ignore them for the most part. New answer? Read on...

Should I really use a META tag? Really?

The new answer is yes, you should use META tags on your site. The keyword META tag is still not used by search engines but when submitting to directories, a valuable use of time by the way, the META keywords are used in many cases to automatically fill in the keywords for your site in that directory.

Even more amazingly, the META description tag has soared in importance. How so you ask? Google has started showing the META description in its search results when certain criteria are met.

The criteria being used appears to be very simple, unlike many of the other things Google does. When the keyword or search terms appear in the META description, the META description is used instead of the snippet of text containing the keyword on your page.

For example, if you do a search in Google for 'Big Oak SEO' you will see our site in the first listing and the description used is our META description tag. All three words being searched for are also in our META description.

If you do a search for 'big oak client' you will see the first listing is pulling a snippet of text from the page itself. Since 'client' is not in our META description, it uses a snippet of text from the page where all three words can be found.

Where should you use a META description tag?

Every website should use a META description tag on the home page at the very least. This way you can say exactly what you want and not worry the snippet of text being used is not best choice for your message. What this really means is Google is giving us some measure of control.

And now that we have this knowledge and control, how best to use it? This allows us to take off our search engine optimizer hats and don our search engine marketer hats. Think of what you can say in the brief sentence that will entice a user to click your link rather than the one above or below. You can put your phone number in the META description for starters or how about being really creative and offer a discount or advertise a sale. Tell them your unique selling proposition. It should be a one sentence phrase already in your head. The only caveat to remember is that your META description will only show if the search term is in the META description. While this can be tricky, it can be done with some forethought. You can do this for all of your targeted pages and have dozens of marketing messages.

Use the META description wisely: target your market and entice your customers. Do not abuse this control and put outlandish, untrue or slanderous statements as I am sure Google will be watching; and if this technique is abused the META description may have seen its last search result this time.

Article Source : Web Site Traffic Promotion

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Both David Fishman & Shell Harris are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.

David Fishman has sinced written about articles on various topics from Information Technology, Home and web development. David Marc Fishman helps webmasters with a link directory like and to e. David Fishman's top article generates over 5000000 views. to your Favourites.

Shell Harris has sinced written about articles on various topics from Home Management, Legal Matters and Music. . Shell Harris's top article generates over 6600 views. to your Favourites.