Some SEO Basic Tips
- Meta Tag Madness
If you're not really a web design guru, Meta tags can
really mess with your head. I remember the first time I tried doing anything
with Meta tags. I thought I was going to lose my mind. I
couldn't remember what form to use and what went where. It took some time, but
eventually, I figured it all out and today Meta tag madness does not drive me,
well, mad. It is the hopes of this article that it will put Meta
tags into terms that are easy to understand and get you on your way to properly
Meta tagging your web pages.
Meta tags are part of the HTML
code that your visitors don't see. All they see are the text and graphic images
that you display on each page. So why do we need Meta
tags if our visitors don't see them? Well, the Meta tags
are more for the search engines than the visitors, though there are actually
two Meta tags that the visitors do see in some form.
We'll go over them first.
The first Meta tag
that your visitor actually sees is the title Meta tag. This
is the Meta tag that gives your web page a name. Most
beginning web designers usually put something like "My Home Page" and
the ones that are really beginners and using something like Dreamweaver or
FrontPage, leave the default which is something like "Title
Goes Here". You can tell who these people are by just looking at their
page when it loads.
The second Meta tag that your visitors see,
they don't see when they come to your site. They
actually see this in the search engine listing of your site. This
is the description Meta tag. Most new people leave this
out and thus the search engines will take the first few sentences of the page
as the description. But if you want people to read a description that is going
to bring them to the site, put a description Meta tag in
your HTML and write something really catchy
and interesting.
While these two Meta tags are seen by the visitors,
they are also seen by the search engines. However, the Meta
tag that you really want to concentrate on the most, which is only seen by the
search engines, is the keyword Meta tag. This
is the Meta tag that tells the search engine all the
keywords that are associated with your site. Why is this important? Because
when a visitor does a search, based on what keywords he enters, that will determine
what sites come up. So, if you have a site on horse racing, then you want to
include keywords that have to do with horse racing so that people will find
your site.
If all this sounds easy, it really is. The
hard part is not the Meta tags themselves. The
hard part is thinking of a good title for your page, one that is keyword rich,
a good description that will get people to your site from the search engines
and finally, good keywords that people are searching with when looking for the
info that your site has to offer. It's not rocket science, but it does take
some work. Meta tag madness doesn't really have to be so
maddening.
Source:
© www.TheWritersManifesto.com