| How to Draw People to Your Website - Using Meta-tags Effectively cont. |
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| Meta-tags can contain the following information; the name of the site or the particular web-page, the owner’s name & contact info, what language(s) the site is written in, whether or not the search engine’s “robots” should also scan other pages linked to the current page, and the keywords that describe what the site is about. In this article we will focus on the Keyword, Title, and Description Meta-tags. |
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| Keywords vs the Keyword Meta-Tag |
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| When I started working on this article, I was surprised to discover there is a big difference between “keywords” and the “Keyword Meta-tag.” The search engines look for keywords in the actual html text. Because so many people abused the Keyword Meta-tag, Google (the #1 search engine as of this writing) no longer uses them. |
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| The Keyword Meta-tag was originally created as an indexing tool to help the search engines. Unfortunately, some web-designers started “spamming” the search engines by repeating the same keywords hundreds of times, or loading up the Keyword Meta-tag with all kinds of variations on those terms. In his book “Search Engine Optimization for Dummies,” Peter Kent recommends limiting it to about 10-12 words and don’t use repetition. |
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| What's in a name? |
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| The Title Meta-tag is where you put the name of the webpage that appears in the upper left of your web browser. You should create a different title for each page using 2-6 carefully selected keywords that relate to its content. Search engines place a great deal of significance on the title of a webpage. |
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| One web-designer has created a site that capitalizes on this fact called the “Britney Spears Guide to Semi-Conductor Physics.” I did a recent search for “Britney Spears,” and this page appeared #4 on the results among a list of 10,600,000 WebPages. |
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