Meta Tag Basics |

Here at Startup-Toolbox.com, we strive to bring you good information to help you in your business. As someone who is just getting acclimated to this whole blog, SEO, meta whozits stuff, I found the following article a great read. Short, sweet, to the point and not filled with a lot of tech speak and jargon that went right over my head. This is from Jarom Adair at Internet Marketing for Business Owners. You can find the original article at this link:

http://tinyurl.com/metfay

Enjoy and Happy Entrepreneuring!

Katherine

Meta Tag Basics: The Good, The Bad, and The Useless

Meta tags are little bits of code usually inserted between the tags on your web site. There are some very useful meta tags out there while others are a waste of time (one of which surprises most people).

With the exception of the title tag, people don’t see your meta tags unless they look at your web site code. Here’s what each of them do and whether you want to bother with them or not.

Meta title:

This is a very important meta tag. Each of your web site pages can have a unique title and search engines pay special attention to what the title of your web page is when ranking each page of your site.

People also see these titles in the tabs in their browser. This page is titled “Internet Marketing For Business Owners » Blog Archive » Meta Tags: the Good, the Bad, and the Useless” (not that you can see the entire title–it’s probably too long to read it all).

Titles should include key words you want that page to rank well for, should be unique to each page, should describe that page and it’s contents, shouldn’t be longer than about 60 characters, and you want to avoid excessive use of commas (,). You don’t want a title that says “The best deals on hats, bags, shoes, belts, shirts, pants, socks, and gloves” because all the commas might make search engines think you’re “key word spamming” (see How to break a search engine’s heart for more info on this and other things that will get you in trouble with search engines).

Meta description:

This is the description of page as it shows up in search engines. For example, if type in IMFBO.com in Google, the description under the IMFBO.com listing says:

“Internet Marketing for Business Owners is full of tips and strategies to help you increase your web site traffic and convert site visitors into paying customers.”

That specific wording is not seen anyplace on the web site itself, but if you look at the code on my site it says:

That’s where Google gets it’s description.

Don’t get too fancy with your description. Keep it to under 200 characters because search engines will only display about that many to your site visitors (20~30 words).

If you don’t have this tag in your page header, search engines will choose what your web site description will say using wording they take from your web site. My site description that Google chose for me originally said:

“Site Links. Login Main Article Page Getting Started Affiliate Program. Dear Jarom: I bought a couple “How to Market Online” guides from some other web sites …”

…not very descriptive, was it?

Meta robots

If you’re interested in bossing the search engine spiders around, you can tell search engines what to index and what not to index on your web site (if you’ve got information you’d rather the world not know about). See the Thwarting the Search Engines tutorial for details on this meta tag.

Meta forward

This is a trick affiliates use a lot. If you’re an affiliate for a web site and your affiliate link is AffiliateSite.com/Xip7uu34npq and you’d rather pretty the link up so it’s not so weird looking, check out How to Pretty Up Your Affiliate Links. This works any time you have a long link you’d like to shorten or make it look nicer.

Other tags

There are other meta tags

Search engines pretty much ignore them.

Meta keywords

Here’s the short answer: Search engines don’t look at keyword meta tags anymore. You can pretty much ignore this tag. This surprises a lot of people.

The long answer: Years ago (circa 1999~2000) when search engines were still figuring things out, meta keywords were something that search engines would use to find out what a web site was about. If someone included the key word “football” in their keyword meta tag, the search engine would make a note that the web site was about football.

Oops, she did it again

Around that time, Yahoo released their search statistics and revealed that the #1 searched for term that year was “Brittany Spears”.

What happened next? Every web site that wanted to get some free traffic added “Britney Spears” to their keywords meta tag, regardless of whether their web site was about Brittany Spears or not.

The result was that anyone looking for information on Britney Spears would find a bunch of web sites, very few of which were actually about Britney Spears. If people don’t get their Britney Spears fix for the day, they stop using the search engine that sends them to bogus sites.

Once the search engines saw this, they started ignoring the meta keywords and instead started looking at the text that is actually on the web site to figure out what the site is about. This made the Britney Spears fans much happier.

Search engines today might glance at your meta keywords, but if your meta tag has “football” in it the search engine will verify that “football” is a major theme in the text of your web site before they list you as a football site.

Oops, she did it again…and again and again

By the way, Britney Spears has topped Yahoo’s search engine list seven times in Yahoo’s history between 1994 and 2009.

Yours in success,
-Jarom Adair