While Meta tags are not the complete answer to the question of "How do I improve my search engine ranking?" they can help with some search engines. Since there are millions of pages with Meta tags, you can add all the pages you want and still not control a sizeable percentage of the pages on the World Wide Web. What are Meta tags? They are information inserted into the "head" area of your web pages. Other than the title tag, information in the head area of your web pages is not seen by those viewing your pages in browsers. Instead, Meta information in this area is used to communicate information that a human visitor may not be concerned with. Meta tags, for example, can tell a browser what "character set" to use or whether a web page has self-rated itself in terms of adult content. Meta tags may help you with some search engines, so you'll want to consider adding them to every page you create. On the other hand, you can find many highly ranked web pages without Meta tags. For example, Meta tags have no effect on how humans will view your pages and enter your information into directories like Yahoo. Titles Use Keywords In Page Titles It is recommended to use keywords in page titles itself. This title tag is different from a Meta tag, but it's worth considering it in relation to them. Whatever text one places in the title tag (between the opening 'title' tag and closing 'title' tag portions) will appear in the title bar of browsers when they view the web page. Some browsers also append whatever you put in the title tag by adding their own name, as for example Microsoft's Internet Explorer or OPERA. The actual text you use in the title tag is one of the most important factors in how a search engine may decide to rank your web page. In addition, all major web crawlers will use the text of your title tag as the text they use for the title of your page in your listings. If you have designed your website as a series of websites or linked pages and not just a single Home Page, you must bear in mind that each page of your website must be search engine optimized. The title of each page i.e. the keywords you use on that page and the phrases you use in the content will draw traffic to your site. The unique combination of these words and phrases and content will draw customers using different search engine terms and techniques, so be sure you capture all the keywords and phrases you need for each product, service or information page. The most common mistake made by small business owners when they first design their website is to place their business name or firm name in every title of every page. Actually most of your prospective customers do not bother to know the name of your firm until after they have looked at your site and decided it is worth book marking. So, while you want your business name in the title of the home page, it is probably a waste of valuable keywords and space to put it in the title line of every page on your site. Why not consider putting keywords in the title so that your page will display closer to the top of the search engine listing. Dedicating first three positions for keywords in title avoiding the stop words like 'and', 'at' and the like is crucial in search engine optimization. The TITLE tag is an important one for search engines like Google, as that is often the first one indexed and it is given higher weighting in the relevance rankings. You have to pay attention to this tag. Keep it short (lower than 40 characters) and let the tag have material relevant to the keywords used during search. As an example, if you had stuffed your Company Name as the TITLE tag, it would not help. The visitor that you want to attract is unlikely to be looking for your Company name in the search string. Think creatively as to what keywords people would use if they were looking for goods or services that your site offers. Keywords and Description Two Meta tags that are important are KEYWORDS and DESCRIPTION. You have to be very careful about how these are developed and positioned. Frequency and location of the keyword that is being searched are important criteria that determine relevance and hence page ranking. The search engine would generally consider the page more relevant if the keyword that is being sought is in the TITLE tag or is in the KEYWORDS tag near the top of the page. Similarly if the sought after keyword is found being repeated in the page, it may give the impression that this is a more relevant page and improve ranking. There is a caveat, though. The above is only a general rule that has been often followed by many search engines, but then there are many variants to it. Several players in the SEO industry have tried to proclaim that this is the gospel truth and hence it has spawned a large number of experts that suggest and resort to keyword stuffing and spamming (repeating long strings of keywords). The result can often be just the opposite. Some search engines penalize pages that have keyword spamming. Some will just ignore these pages. Some engines also do not read Meta tags. The intelligent method today is to stay away from spamming and to use tags judiciously. Blend your technique to attain the right frequency and location, but stay away from any excess or spamming. You can provide an in-depth list of words and phrases in the KEYWORD Meta tag. These words should have some relevance to the specific page or, at least, to your website. While you can vary the case of the keywords, you'll want to concentrate on the lower case because over 90% of the searches either use lower case or are conducted on search engines that are not case sensitive. These keywords should contain variations on the same theme. If your site was about gardening, you could use garden, gardening, home and garden, home gardening, vegetable garden, and herb garden. These are all words that might be used in searches for information that your site might provide. The keywords Meta tag is not intended to replace the actual text on your website. This tag is simply to aid the spider in collecting accurate information about your web pages. The DESCRIPTION tag is used by search engines like Inktomi for the page summary that is displayed on the results page. This summary is what the visitor will read and decide whether he/she wishes to enter your site. If the description is just full of repeated keywords, it won't do you any good, even if your page is ranked high. You still do not have a visitor. May be you have put off a visitor. Meta Robots Tag This is probably the only other prominent Meta tag. This is a very peculiar tag in the sense that it indicates what web pages should not be indexed by Search Engines. The Robots tag is inserted in between the header tags. By default, a crawler will try to index all your web pages and will try to follow links from one page to another. This can be prevented by using the Robots Tag. Most major search engines support the Meta robots tag. The Meta robots tag also has some extensions offered by particular search engines to prevent indexing of multimedia content. There are other Meta tags apart from the ones explored above but most of them are simply ignored by almost all search engines. To sum up, some search engines will give you a boost if you have Meta tags. But don't expect that to necessarily be enough to put you in the top ten. Meta tags are mainly a design element you can tap into, a crutch for helping information-poor pages better be acknowledged by the search engines.
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