Meta Tag Optimization

The title meta tag is displayed at the top of your web browser and is often times the text that you click when you search for something on a search engine. Below you'll find the meta tag that I use on my homepage as an example of what a meta tag looks like.

The Importance Of Meta Tags

With that said, you don't want to stuff it with a ton of keywords because that simply dilutes the main keywords. If you do a search for anything within Google you'll find that the link to each website is actually the title of the page.

In regards to the other meta tags, they have lost a bunch of their pull. In the early days of search engines people would stuff them with keywords that weren't even related to their website just to get traffic. The search engines caught onto this and made the appropriate changes to their algorithms that they use to rank websites.

With this in mind, I still recommend using the tags such as the meta description and meta keywords tags because it certainly won't hurt. Just be sure to use your most important keywords in the keyword tag and limit it to about 5 keywords at most. In regards to the description meta tag, simply use a brief description of that page and limit it to a sentence or two at most.

Meta Tag Example

<TITLE>Make A Website - How To Make Your Own Website</TITLE>
<META NAME="Description" CONTENT="Make A Website Spot is a free tutorial website related to making a website. It covers all of the areas of making your own website.">
<META NAME="Keywords" CONTENT="how to make a website, make a website, create a website, build a website, make your own website">

As you can see there isn't much to it. You ideally want use your main keywords and give a nice description of your website using your keywords but avoid it being too long.

Meta Tag Generator

While you're there I wouldn't recommend submitting your domains with an automated service such as this, I'll explain this later on in this post.

The Title Meta Tag

Example: You can see in the image below how the <title> tag affects the look in an Internet Explorer browser and you'll see the text being used, similar to this:

In review, consider the website keywords you'd like your page to be found for in search engines, then incorporate those terms into your title tag. That text will then be used as your title in many of the search engines results.

The Description Meta Tag

Looking back at the example of a meta tag that I have above. The "name=description" is the meta description tag. The description goes between the two quotation marks and is generally 200 to 250 characters long although none of the search engines will display the full text.

Even though the big search engines like Google & Yahoo won't give much credit to the Meta Description tag, it's still worthwhile to use the meta description tag for your pages. It still gives you some degree of control with various search engine results.

The Keywords Meta Tag

You'll find that the meta keyword tag appears as NAME="keywords" in our example.

The meta keywords tag is used simply to reinforce the terms that describe your site for those search engines that still us it. Again, the reason that most stopped using it is because search engine marketers were abusing it. For example, say my site was about teddy bears. People would include "MP3 players" or anything else not related to their site to get traffic to their site. It was simply being abused so the search engines stopped using it.

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