Sunday, August 5, 2007

The Meta Tags Guidelines

Search Engine Optimization: The META Tags

Meta tags are important tools for unbeaten search engine marketing. The Meta tags are HTML tags that facilitate and explain the document they are located in. Search Engines focus on the three primary tags – Title, Description and the Keyword tags to help them (Search Engine crawlers, spiders, bots) verify the relevance of a website for a particular phrase.

The Title tag describes exactly what the document contains, and is one of the most important tags for a search engine. It is the first one to appear in the search engine results, and it should contain keywords (no repetitions) of terms that you would like to be found, with a maximum number of 80 characters including spaces.

Example:


The Title tags of the web pages can frequently generate rapid and substantial differences to its ranking and because the words in the title tags are what appear in the clickable link on the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). Strategicaly altering them may result in more clickthroughs.

The Meta Description tag has a maximum number of 250 characters that describes the content of a website. This description is not displayed on the page itself, but is largely intended to help the search engines index the page correctly.

Example:


The Meta description tag is a snippet of HTML code that belongs within the Head segment of a Web page and it is usually placed after the Title tag and before the Keywords tag, although the arrangement is unnecessary.

The Meta Keyword tag is used to help define the primary keywords of a web page that contains important keywords and phrases consistent with the HTML body text and page title and has a maximum number of 250 characters including spaces.

Let’s summarize what needs to be done before to create Meta Keyword tags:

• Select relevant keywords
• Write the web site’s content based on these keywords
• Create a Title tag with some of these keywords
• Write a Meta description simple and authoritative using some of the selected keywords.

If possible, these things should be done before optimizing the web site.

Example:


These tags (Title, Description and Keywords) are the most important considerations of search engines to determine relevancy in indexing your web pages. And that makes your link architecture very important.

Here's a checklist to consider in creating tags:

Title tags:
• Provides call to action - YES/NO?
• Contains less than 80 characters - YES/NO?
• Uses important keywords and phrases - YES/NO?
• Describes what the page is about - YES/NO?
• Consistent with other content components - YES/NO?

Meta Keywords:
• Contains less than 250 characters - YES/NO?
• Uses important keywords and phrases - YES/NO?
• Minimal repetition of individual words - YES/NO?
• Consistent with other content components - YES/NO?

Meta Description:
• Provides call to action - YES/NO?
• Contains less than 250 characters - YES/NO?
• Uses important keywords and phrases - YES/NO?
• Describes what the page is about - YES/NO?
• Consistent with other content components - YES/NO?

Definitely, appearing and ranking high on the Search Engine Result Pages have greater chances of perceiving clickthroughs. Meta tags help with that, and it’s positively worth the effort and time gripping, keyword-rich ones.

It is impossible to label the perfect Meta tags because there is no such thing. Testing different Meta tags and determining which of those tags rank higher is the best possible method there is.

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