Meta Tag Secrets - Improve your ranking in search engines

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Meta Tag Secrets guide

Meta Tag Secrets Introduction

Meta Tags are HTML Tags that give information about the web page. Unlike other HTML Tags, they are not displayed by your visitor's browser therefore do not show up on the web page. Meta Tags assist search engine spiders or robots in 'crawling' your page to find out as much information about your site as possible. Basically its free advertising for your business and a cheap alternative to banner ad networks that charge you money for placing your banner ad on another page.

The cheapest way to get more hits is to gain a high placement in one of the search engines by using effective Meta Tags. Remember meta information that is at a poor standard will result in your site being near rock bottom. By achieving a high ranking, you'll ensure more guaranteed hits! Each search engine has a different method of ranking pages. You may already have Meta Tags on your page, usually generated from your html editor. We aim to add the most important meta tags and catapult you to the top of the search engine results page.

First you must create Keyword Tags. Keywords include the main words or phrases that describe the content of your page. For example, a web page such as this one, focusing on search engine ranking, would include the keywords 'Meta Tag Secrets' and 'search engine spider'. Think of around 20 words or phrases. Phrases are two or more words put together. Include acronyms such as crawl, crawling and crawls.

The next thing is the Description Tag. This is where you type a short description of your site. It is also essential to have a title tag. Once you have done that, you need to use the correct syntax or html markup as follows...

<HEAD>

<META NAME="description" CONTENT="type description here">

<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="type your keywords here.">

<TITLE>type your web page title here.</TITLE>

</HEAD>

Ok, now you have done that, you need to optimize this code to integrate in with your page information. The search engine spider that reads your HTML, takes other information into account... This is where we give the best hints, tips and tricks to getting a higher search engine ranking.

Keyword Tag

Make sure your keywords are repeated in the page content at least once. The search engine robot will 'spider' or 'crawl' your page content under the <BODY> Tag as well as the Meta Tags.

Avoid using common phrases such as 'sports' or 'computer games'. Target your keywords to specifics such as 'youth soccer teams' or 'pc gaming releases'. Its best to think of what your competition won't have, then take advantage of these keywords and use them yourselves.

Try to keep the main keywords near to the top of the page. These are going to be the first thing the search engine spider notices and will look upon them as most relevant. Try not to publish large graphics at the top as the spider has to get through these first, before it can read your more important keywords. Relevancy rankings mean that the content at the bottom of the page isn't as significant as what's at the top. The bottom half is not considered priority. This is why its imperative to get it all to the very top.

Extra tips...

Don't place your chosen keywords after keywords when writing the content of your page, place them in a structured sentence so the visitor is reading an interesting paragraph. They are more likely to return.

The keywords should be around 250 characters in total length.

Don't forget to include keywords in ALT text and page link tags. Some search engines rate the text in each link higher than what's on your page under the body tag. ALT text is written in the form...

ALT text

<IMG SRC="graphic address here" ALT="Meta Tag Secrets">

When the mouse hovers over the hyper linked graphic or image, the words 'Meta Tag Secrets' will appear. Move your mouse over the image to see what the code does...

Description Tag

Keep the description to a maximum of 200 characters. A good description includes details of your site, written in an interested and eye catching way. You must include a few keywords in your description. When searching a directory or search engine you must have noticed the word you typed appearing in the short paragraph under the site link. Well, that paragraph is their meta description, and you see they've added a keyword or two in theirs.

Title Tag

A short sentence summing up your sites theme or content. Probably the first thing the search engine spider looks for is the title tag. Try to include one or two of your keywords in your title. Pages with one or more keywords repeated in their title are assumed to be more relevant than ones without them.

Structure your title to be descriptive of your page making sure it would attract people to click on it. This bears no meaning to the search engine spider for ranking your site but attracts the eye of potential readers.

Heading Tag

Include your most popular keyword in the heading tag... This is a very good card to play. The search engines place more weight on the Heading Tag than 'normal' text within your page. This is used as a title or subtitle for a page and often bigger than the other text throughout the page.

<H1> heading here </H1>

Submitting Process

Check your site still appears in the listing on a regular basis. If, for any reason, your sites link disappears, then resubmit. If your page isn't appearing in the top 10-20 you may want to try another keyword or phrase. Some keywords such as 'computer' or 'downloads' or 'free' are very competitive so you might like to replace them with a phrase such as 'free computer downloads'.

Don't only submit your index or home page. Try to submit the main page from each different area of you site. The search engines will usually find these pages from your index submission but it doesn't hurt to help them along.

It's debatable whether bulk submissions work better than submitting by hand. Often, webmasters submit by hand to the 'big eight', and bulk submit to the other hundreds of engines and directories. You can click here to start submitting in bulk: submitexpress.com. However, if you haven't included and optimised your meta information yet, don't bother as you'll probably be on the last pages of the search results.

Text Links

Try to use text links on your home page. The spiders trying to access 'inside' your site won't be able to access them through image links. Usually the bulk and most descriptive content of your site isn't on your home page. An easy way to solve this problem is to have HTML links at the very bottom of your page pointing to the major areas of your site. This way, the spider has a way of getting in!

Tables

Remember I said try to keep keywords to the top of the page? You must remember if using tables, the top of the page to the search engine robot is the left margin. Whatever you have in that column is weighted higher than content at the top centre.

Reviewed Sites

Get reviewed! A reviewed site holds more weight than a non reviewed site. It points towards your site having more valuable information than a site dreamt up on the spot that took a total of five minutes.

Link Popularity

Link popularity is another thing that helps with some search engine rankings. WebCrawler, an example of such, looks through its index to see how many other sites link to yours. The best ways to get other sites to link to yours is to set up a 'reciprocal links' page. It gives other webmasters the chance to get their site noticed so usually there is lots of interest and you don't have to search far.

Updates

This is where most sites fall behind. It is essential to update your page content on a regular basis so that visitors will return. This also has influence on the search engine placement. More frequent updates receive a higher ranking than sites that have been dormant for a number of months.

Spamming

Don't Spam your way into the search engines. this will probably result in your site being banned and also annoy your readers or potential customers if you are selling products. Use keywords that are descriptive of your site, you want to attract the right type of visitor and not a angry one who has been directed the wrong way.

There are certain things that will make the search engine ignore your site or page, effectively 'banning' you from being listed in their index. The Meta Tag 'refresh' allows web designers to refresh their page after a given amount of seconds. However, this also acts as an easy way to redirect visitors to another page instead of the page they are hyper linked to. You'll see how this can be done from the following code...

<META HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" CONTENT="3;URL="page url here">

- this tag should be put in between the <HEAD> </HEAD> tags.

I'd advise against using this tag as most engines will not accept it, some even refusing to list your site. They do this because webmasters can submit hundreds of different URLs all leading to one web page. This clutters the search engines with the same website. Most crawling algorithms have been devised to deal with this, which is why you don't often get the same web site over and over again when searching.

Extra tips...

Do not use very small text or text that is the same colour as your background image. Its considered spamming.

Comments are placed between the

<!--
            this is a comment -->

. They do not show up on the viewable page. In the past, this feature has been abused to cram as many keywords into the page without them having to be viewed by the site visitor. Don't forget the spider reads the source code and not exactly what is viewed on the page. Some search engines have started to ignore the words in these comments and even gone so far as to ban some pages that abuse them.

Optional Tags

An optional Meta Tag you can include is the 'revisit-after' tag. You can specify to the search engine spider when to come back and re spider your page. The tag is written like...

<META NAME="revisit-after" CONTENT=7 days>

This tag should be placed between the <HEAD> </HEAD> tags.

Please note that some of the major search engines such as Lycos don't read keyword Meta Tags at all. Instead they rely on other aspects such as site reviews. The truth is, each engine is different. Each have their own algorithm for listing or ranking a page.

Legal Information

Don't list your competitors name in your meta tags thinking you will benefit from people searching for their site. There are laws against this type of thing. My opinion is to create your own company reputation, it will get you many more visitors than these other methods anyway.

Don't forget

Once you have gained a high ranking, perhaps on the first or second page, do not resubmit your site as you could lose precious and fought over ground.

Once you have completed the all important submission process, don't sit back as there are more things you can do. You'd be surprised how far word of mouth can take your site. Discussion Forum postings, creating a press release and newspaper or magazine submissions are all other effective methods of site promotion.

Additional information...

Visit our search engine page. It has detailed information on the individual search engines. If you have any questions please do not hesitate to email us or alternatively discuss this information in one of our discussion forums.