Meta Tags Explained

Meta Tags
Before 2003 meta tags were used to rank your website by the search engines. Nowadays meta tags are used as the description and links for Yahoo etc, so are still important but for different reasons.

Search Engines
When you do a search for anything on Altavista, Alltheweb, etc the search engines use the information it trawls from your site to create the link. the Title of your page becomes the text that can be clicked. and the Description is the text usually found below the link to your website.

Title
We explained this on the previous page

Description
The page description should accurately describe your Web page and is usually displayed by the search engines along with the title. The description should be less than 200 characters and ideally less than 140 characters. It should contain one or two of you keyword/keyword phrases with the most important one appearing near the beginning.

Keywords
The meta keywords tag is sometimes useful as a way to reinforce the terms you think a page is important for ON THE FEW CRAWLERS THAT SUPPORT IT. For instance, if you had a page about stamp collecting — AND you say the words stamp collecting at various places in your body copy — then mentioning the words “stamp collecting” in the meta keywords tag MIGHT help boost your page a bit higher for those words.

Remember, if you don’t use the words “stamp collecting” on the page at all, then just adding them to the meta keywords tag is extremely unlikely to help the page do well for the term. The text in the meta keywords tag, FOR THE FEW CRAWLERS THAT SUPPORT IT, works in conjunction with the text in your body copy.

The meta keyword tag is also sometimes useful as a way to help your page come up for synonyms or unusual words that don’t appear on the page itself. For instance, let’s say you had a page all about the “Penny Black” stamp. You never actually say the word “collecting” on this page. By having the word in your meta keywords tag, then you may help increase the odds of coming up if someone searched for “penny black stamp collecting.” Of course you would greater increase the odds if you just used the word “collecting” in the body copy of the page itself.

Alt Tags
These are supported by Altavista and Google, and are descriptive tags for images. This means if you have any images on your webpage, ensure the alt tag is used to effectively describe the image.

Meta Tag Generator
Here is a link to a useful meta tag generator, which will help you create the tags easily.

Coming Soon

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