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Meta Tags for SEO Purposes

Guest post by: Sue Cooper

Article Overview: Meta tags are HTML or XHTML elements used in the structure of web pages to provide metadata about the page. They are placed within the section of an HTML or XHTML document and are usually used to detail a page’s description, its main keywords and other information not specified by other elements placed within the tags, which makes them invisible when displayed by web browsers.

Meta Tags for SEO Purposes

Meta tags are HTML or XHTML elements used in the structure of web pages to provide metadata about the page. They are placed within the section of an HTML or XHTML document and are usually used to detail a page’s description, its main keywords and other information not specified by other elements placed within the tags, which makes them invisible when displayed by web browsers.

However, meta tags exist not only to provide information about a certain website, but also to aid web pages achieve better visibility within search engines. The reason why meta tags are able to accomplish this is because, if properly managed, they are able to provide search engines with a way to easily categorise the site, which in turn results in better search engine rankings and more traffic to the websites who used those meta tags. This application in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) has led to many online companies to offer specialised SEO services that focus on meta data.

Here are some of the most important attributes of meta tags when it comes to using them for SEO purposes:

Keywords:The keyword attribute is used by webmasters to indicate to search engines the different topics and subjects their websites deal with. It is a summarised way to effectively convey to search engines the “feel” for any given site’s content. Lately however, as more and more unscrupulous webmasters use them to mislead search engines into scam websites, search engines are slowly giving this particular meta tag less importance.

Description:Contrary to the Keywords meta tag, the description is widely used by most search engines to provide a summarised explanation of a website’s content. This allows webmasters to be creative and unique, which can give them an edge when it comes to getting their visitors’ attention.

Language:It states in what language a certain website is written in. This might not be absolutely necessary for SEO, but it helps search engines prevent targeting audiences a website is not meant for.

Robots:This attribute allows webmasters to be able to choose whether their websites are indexed by search engines or not, as well as if they should follow links from their pages or not. This provides more control to webmasters, which is always a nice thing to have.

Final Thoughts Even if nowadays meta data might not have the importance it used to have some years ago due to the ever more sophisticated search engine algorithms, they are still an essential requirement for any website who aims even for mild success.

If anything, correctly implemented meta tags will at the very least serve as an indication to search engines that your website is correctly structured. This in turn can give the website that implements this meta tag strategy an edge over the hundreds of thousands of other websites out there that use meta tags to overload them with keywords and try to cheat search engines.

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Article Tags: meta tags, search engine optimisation, SEO
Referred by: http://www.searchengineworkshops.com

About the Author: Sue Cooper RSS for Sue's articles - Visit Sue's website Sue Cooper is an SEO Consultant with HomePage Development, a website development company that understands the whole process of firstly building a user friendly and functional website, and secondly, ensuring the site is of a high caliber within the search engines to drive a profitable return on investment for the business owner. Sue's passion is search engine optimisation, and as licensed associate of Search Engine Academy Queensland, conducts regular hands-on SEO training. Because of the low enrolment of all workshops, participants receive individual attention, learning the skills to take their website to new levels of sales growth and lead generation. Click here to visit Sue's website More from Sue Cooper Social Media Strategy Twitter Life and Business 140 Characters at a Time YouTube How to Utilise it as an Effective Marketing Tool Intelligent Site Architecture A Key Ingredient to Successful Online Business Social Media The Big Four

Related Forum Posts
Re: Website Ranking #1 in all Search Engines - To get ranking on Yahoo and Bing you need to have correct Meta Tags as proper optimization is something Yahoo and Bing prefers. Apart from that try to create backward links from Yahoo answers, Wiki answers, Associated content, Flickr. Yahoo prefers these sites and even nofollow links.
Re: SEO... - 1: Find the Best Keywords 2: Discover Your Competitors 3: Optimize Your Title 4: Optimize Your META Tags 5: Use Headings 6: Use Title and ALT Attributes 7: Nomenclatures 8: Create a Site Map Page 9: Include a robots.txt File 10: Install a sitemap.xml for Google MySQL/Oracle:
Re: Does Your Website Have a Robots.txt File? - HI Carol, Your robot file is correct; no lets work on your Page Titles & Meta Data. Do you have access to create different page titles for each page of your website? Do you have your FTP information...please do not post it here but just let me know if you have access. Jeff
Youtube Tags and fake newscasts - in addition to using Tags I also suggest using a video editing software to embed a line of text at the bottom of your video's to point to your site. I've seen some video where people make their video's look like a news release from a news channel (made up news channel). This is no different that submitting an ad in the newspaper and making it look like an article. Keep the video entertaining with some Richard Branson theatrics...
Re: How do u optimize a Blogger blog? - Hi GT, Of course there is a way and you know it, you wrote it down in your question. 1- Optimize your main blog code : Meta keywords, title, description. 2- Optimize your post - look at it as a web page. You need keywords (tags), use them in your title, first and last paragraph, and variations on the entire blog. Use the Strong tag, add title to links and alt to images. This is it. The key here is to do a good keyword search before writing.

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