Some SEO Basic Tips - Meta Tag Madness

If you're not really a web design guru, meta tags can really mess with your head. I remember the first time I tried doing anything with meta tags. I thought I was going to lose my mind. I couldn't remember what form to use and what went where. It took some time, but eventually, I figured it all out and today meta tag madness does not drive me, well, mad. It is the hopes of this article that it will put meta tags into terms that are easy to understand and get you on your way to properly meta tagging your web pages.

Meta tags are part of the HTML code that your visitors don't see. All they see are the text and graphic images that you display on each page. So why do we need meta tags if our visitors don't see them? Well, the meta tags are more for the search engines than the visitors, though there are actually two meta tags that the visitors do see in some form. We'll go over them first.

The first meta tag that your visitor actually sees is the title meta tag. This is the meta tag that gives your web page a name. Most beginning web designers usually put something like "My Home Page" and the ones that are really beginners and using something like Dreamweaver or FrontPage, leave the default which is something like "Title Goes Here". You can tell who these people are by just looking at their page when it loads.

The second meta tag that your visitor sees, he doesn't see when he comes to your site. He actually sees this in the search engine listing of your site. This is the description meta tag. Most new people leave this out and thus the search engines will take the first few sentences of the page as the description. But if you want people to read a description that is going to bring them to the site, put a description meta tag in your HTML and write something really catchy and interesting.

While these two meta tags are seen by the visitors, they are also seen by the search engines. However, the meta tag that you really want to concentrate on the most, which is only seen by the search engines, is the keyword meta tag. This is the meta tag that tells the search engine all the keywords that are associated with your site. Why is this important? Because when a visitor does a search, based on what keywords he enters, that will determine what sites come up. So, if you have a site on horse racing, then you want to include keywords that have to do with horse racing so that people will find your site.

If all this sounds easy, it really is, The hard part is not the meta tags themselves. The hard part is thinking of a good title for your page, one that is keyword rich, a good description that will get people to your site from the search engines and finally, good keywords that people are searching with when looking for the info that your site has to offer.

It's not rocket science, but it does take some work.

Meta tag madness doesn't really have to be so maddening.

To YOUR Success