Meta tags and what the are for as well as what they do
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Meta tags are little snippets of information not typically seen on the website but they work in the background. I am not going to go to in depth into a lot of the tags that you can use because we are going to stress the important ones for your site.
But first, let's start with what meta tags are not.
Meta tags are not a guarantee that your site will get a top ranking in Google or any other index. While they are important (and Google itself even stresses how important they are), they are not the end all to search engine ranking. There is no "silver bullet" that will kill the competition with one good meta that makes you rise to the top. Getting good search engine ranking is a concerted effort. We will deal with search engine ranking later.
Now, what are meta tags?
Other than your title meta tag, most other tags are unseen and tell the search engines not where to index your site, but HOW. The where is up to them and their secret algorithms. Which means the step by step process that the search engines use to index sites. No one will tell you what the process is and anyone who claims that they know for sure is full of crap. We do get a good idea of what the search engines are after thanks to little tidbits that all of the major search engines companies have released to the hungry public. Let's get started looking at the meta tags
This sites meta tags in the "head area"
<head>
<meta name="description" content="Learn what meta tags are and what they do. Why you need meta tags for your money making website and how to use them.">
<meta name="keywords" content="meta tags, what are meta tags, create,meta,tags,">
<meta name="generator" content="Web Page Maker">
<title>Meta tags...what are they and why do I need them</title>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en-us">
</head>
Does this look complicated? Makes me look like a genius right? Not really. Lets look at
how I did this. Just click on the image to enlarge it. You are looking at the meta tag making part of the web page maker that I use. All I did was come up with the a few things and the program did the rest.
TITLE PAGE
That is just a relevant, informative, on topic name for each page in your website. When you do a search engine search, these are typically what you see when the search is completed. Make it one line using about ten words or so. If you make it too long it just gets cut off anyway. Looking back at search results you see the title and typically the description. So lets look at your web page description next.
DESCRIPTION
This just describes what the page is. Again, keep it relevant and use key words. This page is about meta tags so I want them in the title and in the description as well as the keywords. The description can be longer than the title but don't go nuts. Search engines generally index 200-230 characters but not all may be displayed
KEYWORDS
These are words or phrases that hit the main idea of you web page. Here I used "meta tags, what are meta tags, create, meta, tags".
All you are doing with keywords is telling search engines what you feel the page is about and how important each word is. You just type the keywords or keyword phrases in using a comma to separate them. Plain and simple.
Now, before we move on let's go over rules for the meta tags.
Don't go nuts with the keywords, it is called keyword spamming and will eventually cost you in the search results. For example, if I used this as my keywords:
"meta tags, make meta tags, create meta tags, meta tags, good meta tags, meta tags, meta, tags,what are meta tags, meta tags,"
I would possible be penalized for using "meta tags" more that twice. Now, one other point is that the TITLE is probably the most important thing here, followed by the description. The keywords can help too but there are only a few search engines that use them. Then again, you are trying to get indexed well on as many search engines as possible. Even though right now Google is king, can you afford to forget about over 30% of your potential visitors?
CLICK TO ENLARGE
There are a few other tags that you need to be aware of.
These, as you can see in the picture (click on it to enlarge), tell about the character sets and language that your website uses. I have this one every page. It is easy with web page maker because when you clone or duplicate a page, these go along. Of course, so do the meta tags listed about so you want to make sure that you give each page a different title and description at least. I use these with every site and haven't had any
CLICK TO ENLARGE
problems. You will notice in the picture that these tags are in what is called the header. You may be told to put other code in the header, and this is where they would be added. It isn't difficult so don't be overwhelmed. Whatever you use for a web page program will more than likely have shortcuts like this to creating these tags. It really is easy and like I stated, you do it once and it will get cloned onto other pages as you go in most web making programs. I must apologize for my lack of knowledge about other web design programs but the Web Page Maker is it for me. I tried Front Page years ago and it seemed to bulky and quite frankly, to time consuming to learn. Front Page was from Microsoft and while it is still available, they do not offer support for it anymore. Again, you may find something that you like, or you may already have a program that you are familiar with. If so, that is great. I am just trying to help out those that are completely new to building a website.
Custom Search
How to make money online with your own website!
Step by step instructions for building your website and tips on how to make a profit from it!
Meta tags for your website. What they are and why your site needs meta tags
Meta Tags for websites
Making good meta tags
Effective meta tags