Here is a general
overview of META Tags, what they are and how to use them. Plus
a little history which explains why they are a little tricky
to do right.
META Tags are used to help catalog and categorize the contents
of a web page. Many web site design enterprises within a large
fast growing web design community strive to unravel the tricks
these tags are full of. They are not seen by your visitors,
but instead seen only by search engines. In theory the search
engines could just extract this information and include it
in their database as it contains all the necessary information
to catalog and categorize a web page. However, this simple
idea simply does not work. The reason is that like almost all
areas of endeavor, especially in web design community, people
are more likely to try and cheat the system than follow the
rules. If we could get everyone to follow one simple rule it
would make life in the web design community and life in general
a whole lot easier. The rule: "Everybody has to be honest".
No one in the whole web design community knows how a search
engine works, and I mean no one. There is not "a programmer"
that knows how they work. These systems have become very large
and very complex. The majority of the search engine developers'
time and effort is spent trying to keeping ahead of the liars
and cheaters. We won't go into all the ways that have been
used to try and trick the search engines, but if you look at
other sites about web site design promotion I'm sure you see
them touting some latest loophole they've found to cheat the
search engines to get your site to the top of the list. If
'the trick' is more than a day old and it really works you
can be certain that the search engine programmers and web development
specialists are busy trying to find a way to identify the cheating
sites and exclude them from the search engine. More time and
effort is spent trying to cheat the search engines than in
creating quality sites.
So how do you get your site listed in
the search engine? First and foremost
create the best site you possibly can.
Part of this process is to create META
Tags. You may have trouble figuring out
what to put in your META Tags. Which keywords
do I use? Use words that fit the contents
of your site. Say you created a site about
Sam Jones. Sam likes surfing, volleyball
and hot dogs. Use 'Sam Jones' in your
title, description and in your list of
key words. If you do that then your site
will be more heavily weighted on Sam Jones
and less on surfing, volleyball and hot
dogs. The search engines will search the
contents of your page to see if you indeed
talk about Sam Jones.
To achieve a high position in the search
engines it is best to concentrate on a
small number of words and include them
in the title, description and keyword
META tags as well as at the start of your
web page. As more keywords are added,
the relevance of each is diluted resulting
in a lower score by the some search engine
algorithms.
Avoid the temptation to stuff too many
words in your META tags and avoid repeating
your keywords as this may be considered
spamming by some engines resulting in
your site being blacklisted, penalized
or banned.
Some search engines concentrate on only
the <TITLE> tag and very little
else. Site builders have reported that
Altavista works in this manner. Some search
engines ignore the META tags altogether
and concentrate on the body of the web
site. Including your keywords in the top
line of text on the page can help for
situation.
Remember no matter what you do to optimize
your page for one engine today may not
take the same page to the top spot in
another search engine or even the same
search engine in the future. So if you're
not willing to spend your full time keeping
up with the changing search engine technology
then just keep it simple and honest and
the search engines will eventually find
a way to find you. After all their goal
to find the best sites on the net.
It's not actually how many times the
site is visited. After all the search
engines themselves are sending users to
the pages. They judge the popularity of
a site by how many links exist to your
site. The theory is that if a human checked
out your site and thought it was worthy
enough to put an actually link to it then
it must have some content of value. So
this again leads us to fact that your
site must have value.
Another type of 'Search Engine' which
is not really a search engine at all is
a human edit directory. How much would
bet that the search engines check out
these human edited directories to add
weight to sites listed in them? These
are great place to get you site listed.
Remember at the heart of (under all the
new bells and whistles) of Yahoo lies
the granddaddy of human edited directories.
Some people swear that this directory
never get updated anymore, but it does.
It's just take a very very long time to
get listed. And I'm sure that is electronically
assisted. In other words they don't look
at site that aren't statistically popular
yet. I'll bet they aren't the first directory
to list a site unless their paid to do
so of course.
Viaden Inc has done many projects in
meta-tags optimization. You can surely
rely on our experience and skills, as
Viaden developers team know all the refinements
of the matter and how to use meta-tags
correctly, in particular. To read more
on SEO serviced provided by Viaden, click
here.
The used material is by anybrowser.com
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