All About Search Engine Optimization and Meta Tags

Search engine optimization, better known as SEO, is one of the most important steps in creating, maintaining, and promoting an effective and popular website. Instead of spending thousands of dollars on advertising and promotional materials, you can optimize your site for search and enjoy the organic benefits of search traffic for free. What many website owners do not know, however, is all that goes into effective SEO that makes a real impact on page rankings.

There is no facet of search engine optimization more frequently overlooked than ensuring meta tags are placed on every page. Meta tags, written into the code of your page so that they are not visible to visitors, provide the search engines with specific identifiers for the page. Some websites create listings almost entirely with meta tags, yet many site owners never implement them to full effect.

There are two kinds meta tags that have an especially high impact on SEO and how your pages rank. The first is the META KEYWORDS tag. This meta tag lists keywords for spiders, telling them what your website is all about. For example, if you visit www.nytimes.com and right click on the page, and then click on “View Source,” you will find a meta tag about half way down the first page reading META KEYWORDS. This meta tag will display a list of keywords starting with “New York Times, international news, daily newspaper, people, regional news, national news?” and so on. This list includes dozens of keywords that relate to the New York Times but also to newspapers in general.

Most search engines detect these keywords in content, too, but it can be helpful for you to include keywords that are especially low-density in text, such as odd spellings of names and places, related topics not specifically discussed on the page, and any other keywords you have trouble injecting into your content in a user-friendly way.

The second important tag is the META DESCRIPTION tag. The search engines employ this tag to present information about your site when it appears in their search results. Most search engines allow 160 characters here. This is also a place you include keywords to boost your page rankings for targeted phrases.

There are other meta tags, but these two are the most vital to effective SEO. It is critical that you maximize your use of META KEYWORDS and META DESCRIPTION tags by making sure you do not stuff them full of words not related to your content. And, of course, it is important not to use the same keywords too many total times on the same page. Excessive keyword density, like putting in too many keywords on a page, will cause the search engines to mark your pages as spam.

Finally, be sure to use different meta tags on every page. You should target tags to the content included on that particular page. If you repeat meta tags through your site, you will not benefit from valuable differences in keywords on particular pages.

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