Search Engine - Meta Tags

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> How important are META tags?

search engine sage Back to the example I quoted previously - you can see the meta tags on any website by clicking 'View' > 'View Source' on the browser toolbar:

<head>
<title>Affiliate Marketing by Paid On Results, The UK Affiliate Network</title>
<meta name="Description" content="Paid On Results can help Affiliates and Merchants make money as online partners.">
<meta name="Keywords" content="paid on results, online affiliate programs, network marketing, internet marketing">
<meta name="robots" content="index,follow">

Meta tags provide information about a given webpage, most often to help search engines categorize them correctly. They are inserted into the HTML document, but are not directly visible to a user visiting the site.

They're not as important as they were in the mid 1990s, mainly because they were so abused by web designers and web promotion companies, stuffing them with totally unrelated key words in the hope that search engines would promote their website to the top division.

One by one, the major engines started discontinuing using meta tags as part of their main criteria. For those that still used it, the emphasis was reduced.

But that doesn't mean you should ignore them! So here are the ones you should pay close attention to, all others are purely optional and really make little difference to you search results.

1) Meta Title
The importance of page title has already been covered in a previous page. This tag would normally have the same title as contained in the <TITLE></TITLE> tag.

Example: <META NAME="Title" CONTENT="Page Title Here"

Whether or not this is essential is debatable, buy Yahoo! seem to index it, so no harm in including it.

2) Meta Description
A short, plain language description of the document, usually 20-25 words or less. This is rather important as search engines that use this tag will include your description in their results - so it's a great selling line!

Example: <META NAME="description" CONTENT="The engagement and wedding ring specialist in the heart of Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter">

Make your meta description as compelling as you can, it can mean the difference between someone visiting your site or the one below!

3)Meta Designer
Used to signify the designer of the website.

Example: <META NAME="Designer" CONTENT="Bert Smith Web Designs">

This is really optional and usually used by web designers advertising their wares. Search engines ingore it.

4) Meta Keywords
Keywords used by some search engines to index your page in addition to words from the title, document body, and other areas. Make sure to only use keywords that are relevant to your site. The keywords tag is sometimes useful as a way to reinforce the terms you think a page is important for the few crawlers that may support it, now or in the future.
Search engines are known to penalize or blacklist your site for abuse. Also remember by using this tag you are exposing your keywords to your competitors.

Example: <META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="wedding rings, engagement rings, jewellery, Birmingam, clocks, barometers, watches">

Beyond this, there are extra techniques that can be employed, which involve detailed research on your competitors' websites, and an analysis of their content. This can really reap benefits, and is part of the inexpensive service we offer.

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