Meta tags and Web page optimisation techniques

Meta Tags & Web Page Optimisation

Meta tags - Overview

How to create effective meta tags which can help optimise your web page

Installing your meta tags

What major search engines use meta tags?

Different types and purposes of meta tags

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:

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 thier directory, usually in the category which you submitted it to, although the title and description you submit may be edited.

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 optimisation techniques </TITLE>

2. DESCRIPTION

The description tag should be kept between about 100-200 characters. The description should also include words about your subject area and should not simply restate the title of the page, as it should also describe the page.

3. KEY WORDS

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

Installing Meta Tags

-Open up the appropriate HTML 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 <HEAD> tags.
-There will probably be more data between the <head> tags but dont 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 when uploaded:

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

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 of which are not worth mentioning. YAHOO does NOT use meta tags because is is not a search engine, it is in fact an directory of categorised 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.

Types of Meta Tags and there 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="classificaton" 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 optimisation.">

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.

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