Web Resources > Driving Traffic > Search Engines > META Tags

Meta tags are HTML codes placed at the top of a web page that are a small summary of the content and a list of key words and phrases relevant to the page. Although META tags are important different search engines use them in different ways.

A key point worth remembering is that your META tags must match the content of your page or they will bring no benefit.

Titles

This is by far the most important element on your page. Your title is found between the <title> </title> HTML tags.

<TITLE>This is the Title</TITLE>

When somebody does a search on a search engine the search phrase is first matched to the titles of pages. It's crucial that you have the important key phrase in your title if you want to be found in the search engines, or ranked highly.

Your title will also be displayed as the result in the search engine so it also has to appeal to the viewer, but the first priority is to make your title appeal to the search engine.

Keywords

Some search engines (like Google) ignore your keywords, but although not as important as your title, it is again crucial to get your keywords right.

You must select keywords the people use to conduct searches. Use a took like Overture suggestion tool or Wordtracker to create a list of the right keywords. Don't guess the right keywords and phrases, you might use different phrases than the majority of people conducting searches. Use the tools available to get the right keyowrds and phrases.

Your keywords must also be present in your page (see the page optimization section). If you have certain keywords but nothing in your page content to back it up then you will never be found in the search engines.

It is hard to optimize a page to do well for many different keywords. Try to find good keywords for every page in your site. Never use the same long list of keywords for every page.

<META name = "keywords" content = "word1 word2 word3 word4"

Description

Your keywords must be found in your description Keep your description under 250 characters. Few search engines will display more than 250 characters.

<META name = "description" content = "This is the description of my site">

Use the automatic META tags generator in the tools section to create the HTML code to place in your site for your META tags and title.

Resources For META Tags