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META
TAGS
by
Empowerism
At
MSIncome we use Overture's
Search Term Suggestion Tool to find the most appropriate
Keyword Ranking Phrase to market our client's websites.
Type in the key points, offerings, and benefits you identified
for each page, and spend some time analysing what words
customers use when they're searching for these things. These
are the words you'll want to use to describe your product or
service.
Meta tags
provide a useful way to control your summary and positioning
in some search engines (see below).
Meta tags can
also help you provide keywords and descriptions on pages that
for various reasons lack text. Examples are splash pages and
frames pages. They might also boost your page's
relevancy. However, simply including a meta tag is not a
guarantee that your page should suddenly leap to the top of
every search engine listing. They are a useful tool but not a
magic solution.
There are
several meta tags, but the most important for search engine
indexing are the description and keywords tags.
The description tag returns a description of the page in place
of the summary the search engine would ordinarily create. The
keywords tag provides keywords for the search engine to
associate with your page.
DESCRIPTION
TAG
The description
lets you control the description that appears when your site
comes up in search results on a search engine. The
descriptive paragraph matches what's in your description meta
tag. For example, the description tag used in the
pre-designed mirror page is:
"Learn
the secrets of succeeding on the web! Learn the simplicity
of generating daily signups into your down line. Every MLM
and Online Networker needs this program. Top notch corporate
and upline support. Work hand-in-hand with the pros
developing your internet marketing skills and be a WINNER
within 6 months!"
That is the
description that will appear after your URL when your site is
listed in search results.
KEYWORD
STRATEGY
KEYWORD
STRATEGY is really a preparation step in order TO strategise.
Yes, it's important to use the META tag KEYWORDS (more about
that soon), but some search engines do not use that META tag.
Your keywords are still very important to the engines that do
not use the tag.
1. Start
off by thinking of the words YOU would use to find a site like
yours using a search engine. Write them down in order of
importance. But that's just the start-
2. Ask
several customers, friends, or associates what words THEY
would use to find your site, not only on the Internet, but
also in telephone books-you might be surprised. Write these
down in order of importance-the most important ones being the
ones that match up with your list.
3. Then,
the true test. Use these keywords with every major search
engine (any engine linked from Netscape's home page, for
example) and see what you come up with. Do the words bring up
sites like yours?
4.
(Here's the sneaky part-but all's fair
in love and search engine war, right?) Find your competitor's
sites. Go to the menu bar on your browser and view the
"page source"-the HTML-and see what keywords they
are using. It will be at the top of the page, like:
<meta
name="KEYWORDS" content="
x,
x,
x">
Their keywords
are especially important if they correlate with steps (2) and
(3) above and if their site is easily found in a search. Write
these down in order of importance. Now, organize your
all-important list of keywords into one list, with the most
important words at the top.
USING
KEYWORDS TO YOUR OWN ADVANTAGE
Now that you
have done your "keyword" homework, let's discuss how
to use keywords to your advantage.
We'll start
with the most obvious, the META tag strategy. Several search
engines (InfoSeek, HotBot, and AltaVista) use META tags, the
DESCRIPTION tag and the KEYWORD tag specifically, to index
pages and return results for searchers.
It's important
to follow certain guidelines and principles to be sure your
page is spidered and that the engine doesn't filter your page
out of its index due to KEYWORD overuse.
First, tag
placement on the page is very important. Here's how it needs
to look, with the tags in the order they should appear:
<html>
<head>
<!--NOEDIT-->
<title>Descriptive Page Title Which Includes
Keywords</title>
<meta name="DESCRIPTION"
content="description of the page (using keywords) that
will appear in
the search results when people find the page through a search
engine
that uses this META tag">
<meta name="KEYWORDS"
content="the,very,important,keywords,
separated,by,commas,no,spaces,in,order,of,importance">
<!--/NOEDIT-->
</head>
Several search
engines (Lycos, HotBot, Excite, and AltaVista) will spider
your page when you submit it, then will EVENTUALLY go back to
your site and investigate all of your links so they can index
your whole site. Do you have your KEYWORDS and DESCRIPTION
tags on each page? Don't limit your exposure to your home page
alone. Include the tags on every page, making them relevant to
the content of the page.
Follow the
guidelines the search engines themselves set forth for the
KEYWORD tag:
(1) Limit
the character counts of your KEYWORDS tag to 1,000 to fall
within Infoseek's and AltaVista's guidelines. Separate your
KEYWORDS with commas, no need to use spaces (they count as
characters), and place them within the tag in order of
importance.
(2) Don't
repeat a KEYWORD within a tag more than seven times (this
number is only a guideline), and then this repetition should
be used only in phrases, for example: "garden, garden
plants, garden seeds, garden-etc." NOT like: "garden,garden,garden,garden,"
Just use common sense here - if you're trying to
"cheat", keep in mind that the search engine will
probably figure that out. Keyword repetition might work for
some for awhile, but most (if not all) the engines are
penalising for excessive repetition-why take a chance that
your page will be dropped completely?
KEYWORDS
HERE, KEYWORDS THERE, USE YOUR KEYWORDS EVERYWHERE!
Let's take a
look at the importance of using your keywords throughout your
web pages.
Alta Vista uses
the META tags, but it also ranks relevancy based on word
frequency of the first text it finds. What is the first text
it will find? Your page title. So, don't you think you'll get
better results if your page is all about Tupperware if you use
that term in your page title? For example, instead of
"KITCHEN ACCESSORIES" for a page title,
"TUPPERWARE - TUPPERWARE FOR THE KITCHEN" or
"TUPPERWARE KITCHEN ACCESSORIES" would give you much
better results. WebCrawler uses META tags, but it puts MORE
emphasis on your page title than on META tags. Web Crawler
also rates how many times the search terms occur in the
document. With all the search engines, actually, the page
title is an important feature.
Who Provides the Most Searches?
Using your
keywords in your content is another very important strategy.
And in most cases, the text closest to the top of the page is
the most important. If you can add some descriptive text using
key words at the top of the page without totally destroying
your design, then do it.
Lycos and
Excite don't use META tags--they index all the text on your
page, so you want to be sure that you use your most important
keywords in your content. What is your content? Of course, you
know it is the text on your page. This text also includes page
headings (or should). Some of the search engines seem to pay
more attention to the page headings than regular text, so
you'll want to take advantage of this. **Page headings are the
HTML that make your text bigger and bolder, and are used as a
brief description before a series of paragraphs.**
<h1></h1> will make the heading very large, but
you can always go down to <h6></h6> and use this
keyword strategy. (The larger the heading, however, the
better.) You can use your imagination a little bit in using
this heading feature with your keywords--for example,
<h6> and <strong> or <b> look a lot alike!
Another
spot you can use your keywords is in the <alt> tag for
images. If the first item on your page is your banner, you can
use this <alt> tag to add some descriptive phrasing
using your keywords. This also makes life more interesting for
people as they are waiting for the image to load. And here's
another little tip: your field names--a search engine that
uses keyword frequency to rank search results will give your
page more weight if your file name is www.yoursite.com/tupperware.html
than if it is named www.somesite.com/~myhome.html.
Click
here to create your meta tags
Now
we are ready to publish
the pages.
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