Title Tags:
The title tag is a great place to add your targeted keywords. The text inside the title tag displays as your page’s title in the search engines’ results. The title tag should be no more than 6 or 7 words, with the keywords appearing at the beginning of the tag. If your title is any longer, the level of Keyword Density drops (so the words become less important to the SERPS).

Anchor Text:
Anchor text links are ranked as very valuable to search engines, so plenty of them should be in your web pages. The most powerful anchor texts of all are those whose text contains targeted keywords.  Each click on an inbound keyword anchor link will count as a vote of that keyword to a search engine’s rankings. There’s a whole article on Anchor Text Optimisation available in the archives.

Heading Tags:
Adding keywords in heading tags (H1, H2 and H3) is as beneficial as putting them in the page title. Do not use words like “and”, “for”, “the”, etc. as they are ignored by search engine spiders. Try to make best possible use of this place in your website.

URL:
Including targeted keywords in your website’s URL is helpful from an SEO perspective. Also be sure to use hyphens (-) instead of underscores (_) in your URL to separate text. As with title tags, the more words you have, the less “strength” or weight they will have with the search engines.

Meta Tags:
Although Meta tags are no longer recognized by Google, they are still helpful for other search engines like Yahoo and MSN. If you are optimizing for other search engines, it’s a good idea to place some keywords in Meta tags. If you would like to read more on meta tags, there’s a list of meta tags and also an article on the myths of SEO and meta tags.

Alt Tags:
Search engine spiders are unable to read images or graphics. If you have images in your web pages, then make sure to include several top targeted keywords in the ALT tags. Be careful not to “stuff” the alt tags with too many keywords, however, or your rankings could be dropped.

Website Body:
Strategically “sprinkling” keywords throughout the body of your website is ideal. All pages should contain at least the top 2 keywords that you are targeting, and all articles and other content should be peppered with various targeted keywords as much as possible. Also note that the closer to the top of your page, the moreweight the search engines will add to them.

Using this short list to help you with your keyword placements will surely benefit your search engine rankings.

DM

Meta Refresh Tag

The Meta Refresh Tag is used to redirect a visitor from one page to another or refresh the same page in a specified time. Same page refresh comes in use when the page content is changing very quickly, for example if there is a running score of a game or stock prices updates happening on that page.

When inserted into an HTML document, it causes the user’s browser to load the same or a new web page after a specified number of seconds. This Meta Tag has been manipulated and is sometimes abused as a tool to “bait and switch” a user from a doorway page; a practice that is not popular with the search engines.

It’s used in the following syntax:

<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”60″>

*Content = “60″ denotes refresh after 60 seconds

To redirect to another page, this syntax can be used:

<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”2;url=”>

Because it is so open for abuse, using a meta refresh tag to redirect to another page is likely to get it dropped from search engines, since this method is recognised as a doorway page in search engine algorithms.

Unless you have a compelling reason to use meta refresh tag, do not use it.

Meta Author Tag

The Meta Author Tag identifies the creator of a web page. Though not highly supported, its format usually includes the name and contact (email) details of the webmaster.

<meta name=”Author” content=”Author Information”>

Generally, this is not crawled or recorded by search engines. However, it can be used when you are working as a team on a large website and need to identify the original author. It has no benefit to your ranking.

Meta Revisit-After Tag

The revisit-after META tag is not supported by any major search engines; and it probably never will be. It was developed for Vancouver Webpages and their local search engine searchBC.

The original intention was to increase the crawl rate of search engines to your site. However, no one can increase the revisit time in this method.

The tag syntax is used as follows, with the date always calculated in days:

<meta name=”revisit-after” content=”93 days”>

However, this is something of a moot point, as even Vancouver Webpages now no longer support the tag either.

Meta Distribution Tag

The Distribution Meta Tag identifies the level of distribution of your web page and how it should be further classified in context to the World Wide Web. The three forms of distribution supported by this Tag are:

‘Global’ specifies that your web page is for mass distribution.
‘Local’ lets you specify that your document is for local distribution only.
‘Internal Use or IU’ specifies that your document is not intended for public distribution.

Syntax for different Meta Distribution Tags:

<META name=”Distribution” content=”Global”>

or

<META name=”Distribution” content= “Local”>

or

<META name=”Distribution” content= “IU”>

This has no effect on ranking or any other impact on search engines.

Further Tags

Abstract Meta Tag

This obscure tag gives an overview of the entire web page in a sentence.

<meta name=”Abstract” content=”Abstract phrase”>

Copyright Meta Tag

The copyright tag gives copyright information about your page, which you wish to disclose.

<meta name=”Copyright” content=”Copyright Statement”>

Expires Meta Tag

The expires tag lets the search engines know when the content on your web site would expire.

<meta name=”Expires” content=”Mon, 22 Jan 2004 17:45:05 GMT”>

Language Meta Tag

The language tag defines the language used on your web page.

<meta http-equiv=”Content-Language” content=”EN”>

You can also define more than one language by using a comma delimited list. The first language is your primary language.

<meta http-equiv=”content-language” content=”en,fr”>

Ratings Meta Tag

This tag is used to tell the search engines if your site is for general, restricted or adult audiences.

<meta name= “Rating” content= “General”>

These last tags are rarely used and are more for information in your web page than for any aspect of SEO (although language will help you to rank differently in foreign language search engines).

It’s worth noting that there are more meta tags available for use. However, their use is eroneous at best.

On occasion, some of these search engine spiders may not be able to read the robots.txt file. When this happens, the robots meta tag comes into play. In effect, this is a last chance to keep content out of search engines.

If this meta tag is missing, or if there is no content, or the robot terms are not specified, then it will be assumed that the search engine may index all of your site. Therefore, it makes more sense to use this Meta Tag in case you don’t want certain parts of your web page indexed.

Writing a Robots Tag

The syntax for the robots meta tag can look like any of the following:

<meta name=”robots” content=”index,follow”>

or

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,follow”>

or

<meta name=”robots” content=”index,nofollow”>

or

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow”>

Robots Tag Myths

“If you have a robots.txt file, you don’t need a meta tag.”

False. Although this is true for the majority of the time, occasionally a search engine may not be able to view the robots.txt file. The tag provides a second chance opportunity to restrict content from being indexed.

“I can use a robots meta tag instead of a robots.txt file.”

False. Again, although it is possible to restrict content with the meta tag, the first option should be for the txt file. The robots.txt file has far more options for restricting areas of your site from being crawled.

A later article will discuss the robots.txt file in detail. In the meantime, our meta tag discussions continue with some of the more obscure elements.

There have been numerous discussions at various search engine marketing forums surrounding the use of the keywords tag and its effectiveness. Although the overall consensus is that the tag has little to no relevance with the major search engines, according to the forum posts (and Danny Sullivan), Yahoo! have stated that they do look at the keywords tag. So do Ask.

I have tried to find evidence of this in Yahoo!’s ranking information, and have been unable. Additionally, although META Keywords Tag used to be one of the most important areas after the title element and page description, this tag has also been abused over the years so much so that the search engines have decreased the relevance of the keywords tag. In some instances, the keywords tag has been deemed irrelevant.

That is not to say that the tag is completely without merit and special attention should be given to ensuring that the tag is written correctly.

Writing a Keyword Tag

When it comes to creating your keywords, some advisors say that much research should be undertaken prior to deciding on what should be included in the meta tag. However, given that the tag has less weight given to it by search engines today, I wouldn’t advise you to obsess over ensuring that you have the best possible keywords.

The majority of your SEO will come from work you do away from your own site; the on-the-page work completed with meta tags will only add the finishing touches to your campaign.

Additionally, not all engines use the tag; indeed, the majority actually ignore it completely. So what is the point of the keywords element?

One of the benefits that the keywords meta tag offers is to use it for misspellings. Search engines greatly frown on hiding text on screen. For example, using a CSS file to show the text the same colour as the background. However, as the keywords tag is only really used by Yahoo! And Ask, and generally ignored by other engines completely, you can use it to store common spelling errors.

This won’t win you any brownie points in SERPs through Google, but it could help those users on Yahoo! whom have inadvertently typed in a search word incorrectly.

If you plan on using the tag, the syntax is as follows:

<meta name=”keywords” content =”keyword 1, keyword 2, keyword 3 etc”>

Keyword Tag Myths

“Getting the right keywords improves your ranking.”

False. As we’ve already seen, many search engines ignore the tag, and those that do add weight only put far more stead on the title tag and your off-the-page activity.

More tag explanations are coming shortly.

Along with the title tag, this is presented in the search engine results pages (SERPs) and advertised your site to would-be visitors. After reading the title, a user will read through your description and decide whether or not to visit your site. For this reason, it is important that your description is nicely composed describing your page offering whilst also enticing the user to click on your listing.

The syntax of the description tax is very simple:

<meta name=”description” content =”Your description is entered here”>

As with the title tag, many WYSIWYG editors, such as DreamWeaver, GoLive and FrontPage, do not enter this information into your HTML template.

Writing a Description Tag

If you perform a search on Google, you can see that the description portion of the results listings are quite short; usually around 15 words. For this reason, your description should not exceed 20-25 words (140-200 characters – depending on your title length, as this is also shown in the listing), and you should also remember that possibly only the first 10-15 words will be shown to a potential user.

It is worth noting that the description is not used by search engines for ranking purposes, due to historical keywords spamming as discussed in the main article on Meta tags and SEO.

With this in mind, you can feel free to write your description in a form that is purely for human consumption, but also short and to the point.

Description Tag Myths

“If you include your keywords, you can improve your rankings in Search Engines.”

False. Following the misuse of the tag in the late nineties, most search engines do not support the description tag at all. It is used solely to provide anecdotal information about your web page content.

“If you use duplicate descriptions across multiple pages, search engines penalise your results.”

False. Although search engines passionately protect their search algorithms, there is no evidence to suggest that this is the case. Indeed, with the tag not being fully supported, it certainly seems unlikely.

I hope that this has helped to clear up some of your concerns around using the description meta tag.

There are more tags that we will be covering in later articles.

Indeed, it is the single most important element on your web page – bar none.

The title tag controls the text that will appear in the top of your browser and, if you’re using a tabbed browser such as Firefox or Internet Explorer 7, the text in your tabs. It also forms the anchor text for your site hyperlink in the SERPs. It does not appear anywhere else on your web pages.

Users of a search engine will click on the hyperlink to visit your site; so you can see how important it is to human visitors browsing SERPs to have a title that is intelligible, short and punchy. Also, search engines themselves will gather information about your site from the title tag, too.

Using the tag is very simple, and the syntax is as follows:

<HEAD>
<TITLE>Meta tags and SEO</TITLE>
</HEAD>

Writing a Title Tag

As search engines use the title tag to identify your site, it is vitally important that we understand how to write a title that works to our benefit, rather than our detriment.

Take this title, for example:

<HEAD>
<TITLE>YouShop.com has loads of great products and free downloads. Check us out</TITLE>
</HEAD>

Although this is informative and written in a natural language, the search engines loathe this. Google will only read about the first 90 characters of your title and assigns a weight to each of the words based on the keyword density of the title.

In this example, we have 12 words. If the most important words for us are “free”, “downloads” and “products”, Google will assign a weighting of 1/12, as each word appears just once out of the 12 words in the title.

We can shrink the erroneous words out of the title by using the “|” symbol and lose the last part of the title, which serves no purpose:

<HEAD>
<TITLE>YouShop.com | Loads of great products | Free downloads</TITLE>
</HEAD>

Already, this is looking more attractive to our search engines. However, there’s more to do.

Not only do search engines concentrate on word density; they also assign weight based on where the word appears. As most languages read from left-to-right, Google assigns the most weight to the first word in the sentence and the least to the last.

If you want to optimise your keyword “YouShop.com”, this is a good thing. If not, we need to rework our title some more and decide which is the most important word(s) for this page.

At this point, you should also be aware that search engines will also look at the other page titles in your site. If they’re all the same, then this will also damage the level of weight that they assign.

With this in mind, we could create a different title for two different pages:

<TITLE>Free Downloads | YouShop.com</TITLE>

and

<TITLE>Great Products | YouShop.com </TITLE>

This has a few benefits:

• There are few words, so the keyword density is much richer
• Search engines will weight pages differently, which helps PageRank (in the case of Google) be assigned to internal we pages
• The text is short and informative for human SERPs visitors

This last point is vitally important. Although we are optimising for search engines, it is people that will eventually click through from the search engine. Remember, your title element is the very first thing that the visitor will see, make sure it leaves a clicking impression.

Title Tag Myths

As we’ve already discussed, search engines will weight words based on position and on their density in the title phrase. If you observe these two things, many of the myths around the title also disappear.

Spamming your title reduces the density and, therefore, the importance that Google deems it has. This statement was optimised for the search terms “bags” and “bag”:

<TITLE>Sports bags, hand bag, gym bags, cheap bag, canvas bags, shoulder bags</TITLE>

As you can see, the title:

• Makes no immediately readable sense to human visitors clicking through from search engines
• Dilutes the effectiveness of both “bag” and “bags” keywords*
• Identifies “bag” as being only the fourth most important word in the title

It would be far better to have separate pages for each genre of bag and individually optimise that area of bags.

* Google is currently experimenting with “stemming”. This will, hopefully, enable the search engine to identify both plural and singular versions of the same word.

Other Title Myths

“Search engines are case sensitive, so I have to write my words in multiple cases” (i.e. “bag”, “Bag”, “BAG” etc)

False. Most search engines are not case sensitive, so you can write your title tag in a way that looks most visually appealing. Remember, there’s a person at the end of the search.

“Using only keywords gets me a better result”

False. Although it may get you an initially better search engine result, the number of clicks through to your site will not be as positive if your title is incoherent.

As well as being the anchor text in the search engine, the title tag usually appears as the text when you ‘bookmark’ or add a page to your ‘favourites’ list. Therefore, it should make sense when a person reads it later.

“I change my title every few days and I get better results.”

False. Constantly changing your title will have no effect on the ranking of your site as the crawl rate and changes in the search engines can take time.

If you have a page that’s doing well, leave it be. Let it slip down to page 2. Even then, be real careful about the changes you make. Usually a small change is all that is needed to bump it back into place. You may even want to look at adding a second keyword if it already isn’t there.

I hope that you found this article useful. More tags will follow shortly. Next up is the meta description tag.

However, with the majority of your SEO impacts coming from off-the-page activity (i.e. work done outside of your HTML statement, such as link building), just how much impact do Meta tags have on your site’s ranking? Also, there are loads of different flavours of tags – do they all impact your site in the same way?

The short answer is, unfortunately, not. In a bid to bring some clarity to the party, this article has been written to highlight some of the impacts and issues of your Meta tags so that you can take advantage and improve your ranking over your competitor’s sites.

What are Meta Tags?

Meta tags are included in the <head> section of your HTML code of your web pages. In this section, you will find the Title Tag plus other information that is not visible to your human web-visitors, but is intended for search engine crawlers.

These tags are included so that the search engines can more easily list your site in their indexes. View the source code from any web site and you will see these tags and their contents.

As they are only viewed by the search engine crawlers, it is not necessary to include Meta tags in your HTML. Indeed, many WYSIWYG editors such as DreamWeaver and FrontPage do not place blank tag entries in your auto-generated HTML. There are many websites that don’t have any Meta data stored at all.

Why are Meta Tags used?

When originally developed, Meta tags were designed to give webmasters a way to help search engines to understand what their sites were about. Search engines could then know how to index and rank sites in their results pages (SERPs).

The first major search engines to make use of Meta tags were Infoseek and Altervista back in 1996, and were followed soon afterwards by Inktomi and Lycos.

As creating the Meta tags in code is very simple, and the search engines were heavily reliant on them initially, this led to massive keyword spamming. As a result, most search engines withdrew their support of Meta tags, and particularly the “keywords” tag.

From being considered as one of the most reliable and important tool, Meta Tags are now often abused. In the present day scenario a vital feature that the Meta Tags provide to the websites is the ability to control, to a certain extent, how some search engines describe its web pages. Apart from this, Meta Tags also offer the ability to specify that a certain website page should not be indexed.

Using Meta Tags provides no guarantee that your website page will rank highly in the search engine rankings. Indeed, due to this wide-scale abuse and manipulation of the Meta keywords Tag, most search engines don’t support it anymore.

Types of Meta Tags

There are literally tens of Meta tags that could be discussed. Below is a list of the most important tags and their uses, as well as their misconceptions.

Click on each to visit their own blog page:

The Title Tag

The Description Meta Tag

The Keywords Meta Tag

The Robots Meta Tag

Other Meta Tags