Meta tags and Web Page Optimization Techniques

S U P P O R T

Meta Tags ¬

Meta Tags & Web Page Optimisation

Meta tags - An Overview
How to create effective meta tags which can help optimize your web page
Installing your meta tags
What major search engines use meta tags?
Different types and purposes of meta tags
Other Ranking Considerations

Meta Tags - Overview

There are several ways of using meta tags, however we will concentrate on how to use them to get your site listed on the top search engines which utilize them, firstly by using title, description and key words tags.

Examples include:

Google
Lycos
AltaVista
Hotbot

Put meta tags on every page that you create and publish. The search engines will find all your pages and if you want to stand a good chance of them ranking your pages highly, you'll want to put the meta tag element on each of them. However, it is most important to have meta tags on the index page of your web site as this is often the first page people view and is submitted most to and listed most often by search engines. When you type words in a search box on a search engine, the list of web sites which will be returned in the results would have been found according to the meta tags and text within the web pages, which give you the corresponding sites to the words that you typed. The indexes & directories such as Yahoo and DMOZ (Open Directory Project) will not use this method to return search results. Directories will have a human review your site and add it to their directory, usually in the category which you submitted it to, although the title and description you submit may be edited.

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How to Create Effective Meta Tags

1. TITLE

Keep your title quite short and include words relating to your subject area.

<TITLE> Meta tags and web page optimization techniques </TITLE>

2. DESCRIPTION

The description tag should be kept between about 100-200 characters. The description should include words about your page and should not simply restate the title. This is the description shown below your link shown on the search engine results page.

3. KEY WORDS

Key words and/or phrases relating to your subject should also be used (comma separated), they should be between 200-500 characters long.

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Creating Meta Tags

-Open up the your preferred HTML (Web page) editor.
-View the HTML code.
-find the <HEAD> tag. This is at the very top of the page, and insert the meta tags between the starting <HEAD> and closing </HEAD>tag.
-There will probably be more data between the <head> tags but don't worry this is not a problem, just try to place your meta tags just below the top <head> tag like in the below example.

Here is an example of what our meta tags could look like:

<head>
<TITLE> Meta tags and web page optimization techniques </TITLE>
<META name="description" content="All about meta tags and web page optimization techniques, including how meta tags help optimize your web pages for top search engine positions.">
<META name="keywords" content="meta tags, meta tag, web page optimization etc...">
</head>

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Major Search Engines which use Meta Tags

Google
AltaVista
Lycos
Hotbot
MSN
AOL
IWON
FAST
Alltheweb
Search it
Northern Light (apparently!)

Many more search engines use meta tags but most are not worth mentioning. YAHOO does NOT use meta tags because is not a search engine, it is in fact an directory of categorized web site's which are ranked, basically according to how good Yahoo think they are and by what title & description they have in their Yahoo listing.

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Types of Meta Tags and Their Purposes

<TITLE> Title here</TITLE>
<META name="description" content="description here">
<META name="keywords" content="key words here">
<META name="author" content="text here">

The copyright tag explains itself.

The classification meta tag indicates what topic or subject area your web site can be listed under.
<meta name="classification" content="Meta tags">

The language tag also explains itself.

If you are aiming your site at an international audience then Global would be appropriate, if not then maybe you would prefer Europe or UK or USA?

The purpose of this meta tag is to get the search engine's robot to revisit the site after a specified time period so it can account for any updates, although it rarely works now as most decent search engines automatically update with information from a web page after a few weeks anyway. Some search engines however may not accept your site if you have this meta tag in your source code.

This meta tag acts like a classification tag and mini description at the same time
<meta NAME="abstract" CONTENT="Meta tags and web page optimization.">

I recently found this meta tag in the source of a web site I was browsing and was amazed to find the below meta tag which attempts to get the search engine to rank the site at number one in search results! ,although I doubt very much that it would work!
<meta name="rank" content="1">

The robots meta tags are a way of directing the robots of search engines to which pages you want them to see, for example, the below tag instructs the robot to scan all the index page and follow on to the other pages

The below robots tag instructs the robot to scan all of the site
<meta name="robots" content="ALL">

The below tag would instruct the robot to scan no further than the contents of the index page.

Other Ranking Considerations

Popularity...
This is VERY IMPORTANT. In order to provide the best search results for their users search engines list pages in order of their popularity. As much as 40% of your ranking is determined by this!
In essence, search engines interpret a link from page A to page B as a vote by page A for page B. But also looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."
Combining popularity with sophisticated text-matching (meta and the body of your page) techniques, search engines find pages that are both important and relevant to your search.
The best way to ensure a high search engine listing is for your page to be linked from lots of pages on other sites. Most all search engines find sites through a process known as "crawling" the web. This involves robot software that follows hyperlinks from site to site. The more sites that link to you, the faster you'll be found and the better your ranking will be.

Find out who links to your site.
You can use Google (our favorite search engine) to quickly find sites that link to yours. Some words, when followed by a colon, have special meanings to Google. One such word for Google is the link: operator. The query link:siteURL shows you all the pages that point to that URL. For example, link:www.google.com will show you all the pages that point to Google's home page. You cannot combine a link: search with a regular keyword search.

Time from submission to being listed...
Looking at approximately more than 2 billion URL's during the crawl, he process may take several weeks to complete.
When a URL is submitted to a search engine it is scheduled to look for it in the next crawl. If you've already submitted your URL, your site could easily appear in the new index, which will go up when the current crawl is completed. However, if no other site links to yours, it may be difficult for the crawler to find you. Conversely, if many sites link to your page, there is a good chance you'll be found even without your submitting your URL.
You can expect your page to be indexed within a day to several weeks depending on the particular search engine, how soon the next crawl is scheduled to index your URL, and your sites popularity.

Ranking Changes...
Most of the major search engines update their index at least every four weeks. Each time they update their database of web pages, the index invariably shifts: The search engine finds new sites, loses some sites, and sites ranking may change. Your rank naturally will be affected by changes in the ranking of other sites.

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