Master Your Meta Tags

By Kelley Williams

Mastering Meta Tags isn't as hard as a beginner might think. It is important to include these tags in every page on your site, because it helps the search engines to index your pages properly. It also helps visitors to find your site.

Meta Tags can get very complicated however. They can be used to identify the author of the page, what HTML specifications the page follows, the keywords and description of the page, and the refresh parameter, which can be used to cause the page to reload itself, or to load a different page. We are just discussing basic Meta Tags in this article.

better to create your own Meta Tags.

Meta Tags go between the <HEAD></HEAD> tags in your document. A simple Meta Tag looks like this:

<HEAD>

<TITLE>Document title Here</TITLE>

</HEAD>

The Meta Tag should be typed on a single line, without line breaks. The keywords must be less than 1000 characters. That doesn't mean that if you use 999 characters that all the search engines will include all of your keywords-all 999 characters. Infoseek only uses up to 744 characters while AltaVista uses less than 500.

Do not repeat any keyword more than three times. The search engines consider this spamming. If they catch you doing this, they won't index your site at all. Some search engines are case sensitive. If you are concerned with this, you will have to contact each search engine to find out if they are case sensitive or not.... and that takes time my friend. It is better to either use all caps or all lower case.... either way.

The description must be less than 150 characters. This is what the search engines display when they index your site. It should be something that "hooks" the viewer... makes them want to see more. Use a few of your very most important keywords in your description. Avoid using commas in the description.

Don't rush when you are creating your Meta Tags. When choosing keywords, think about what words you would type into a search engine to find other pages on the same subject as your document. Ask a friend what keywords they would use to search for that specific topic.

Some search engines even give you a hint as to what keywords to use. When you type in a keyword, it will come up with your results, and give you a choice of words to add to your search that might help narrow it all down. It might be a good idea to use these words as some of your keywords. Just go to a search engine that does do this, such as Excite, and type in what you feel is your "main" keyword, and see what they come up with.

Kelley Williams is the owner of K. Williams Resources, which publishes six ezines, and offers an online course in Ezine Publishing. You can contact her at kwilliams@imsday.com

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