How to Build Meta Tags for Higher
Search Engine Rankings
Before you submit your Web site to the search engines, you should make
sure it is ready to be categorized correctly. You can control how
search engines catalog your site with two types of HTML tags. These
meta tags are part of the HTML code that search engine crawlers look
for but visitors to your pages never see.
- Description meta tag: Lets you specify a short summary
that appears below the webpage's title on a search response. This
is what the person sees to decide if what your Web site is worth
visiting. It should be your initial sales pitch, so choose your
description carefully.
- Keyword meta tag: Lets you specify the keywords that a
search robot should give precedence to when cataloging the page.
keywords are typically given less importance than words in the
title, but more importance than words found in the page's body.
These tags typically go between the head tags of an HTML page. Here
are some guidelines and tips for selecting keywords:
- Make a list of relevant keywords that you think people will
search for when they are looking for a Web site like yours.
- Make sure your keywords include both general and specific words
related to your site.
- Your keyword meta tag should be less than 1000 characters in
length, including spaces and commas.
- If you are finding it difficult to think of keywords that people
will enter in their searches, then use a thesaurus and copy some
from your competitor's Web sites! By the way, we didn't tell you
that.
- Make your keywords plural. Add a "s" to the end of
keywords. Otherwise if someone types in, lets say
"forms", it will not match the keyword "form"
in your meta tag. But if the person typed in "form", it
will match it with "forms", as the word is contained
with your keyword.
- List the important keywords first as some search engines give
precedence to keywords listed first.
- If your keywords are difficult to spell, list various
misspellings of the keywords. People will often misspell a search
word. So if the misspelt words matches your misspelt keyword then
your Web site will appear in the listing, whereas your competitors
won't.
- Don't repeat keywords too often. Only repeat it about 3/4 times,
otherwise you may be penalized.
- Don't hide keywords in the background. In the old days, people
used to hide keywords by displaying it the same color as the
background. So you can not see it on the screen, but it is listed
in the page. This tactic worked when search engines were
unsophisticated and judged a word's relevance only by the number
of times it appeared on a page. Now, most search engines know
about this trick and count only the first few occurrences of a
keyword or phrase. Search engines will penalize your page, by
placing it further down the list or not listing it at all.
- Don't use software that generates your pages dynamically. Search
engines don't index dynamically generated pages.
- Don't use frames. Many search engine crawlers ignore sites that
use frames.
- Visit searchenginefirst.com.
This Web site is packed with information regarding search engines
and you will pick up a few tips there.
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