Why do you need Meta Tags? Easy. They improve your web site's ranking in Search Engines

Most search engines include Meta Tags in their measurement of the relevancy of certain keywords as they relate to your web site. Some read Meta Tags and post them with your listing. Other engines review the tags along with the other textual content of your web site to measure overall relevancy. If you are planning to submit your site to any of the large search engines, your conent is the most important "keywords" you have, but Meta Tag implementation is also essential! Phrizbie Design will make all your pages "search engine ready" before uploading your final site. We ask you to provide us with a list of 25 keyword phrases that best describe your business in the most detailed way possible. Think about what makes you unique - that is the key to success on the internet.

Search Term Suggestion Tool Not sure what keywords to use?

WordTracker  is great tool for keyword research, both for suggesting phrases and for helping you determine the popularity and competitiveness of a keyword phrase. They have a free trial on their site. Overture.com  has a free suggestion tool in which you can enter a keyword or a phrase and get information on phrases that include a particular keyword or phrase and how many times that phrase was searched for in Overture in the past month. It will also make suggestions on other keyword phrases that include that word or phrase. Be sure that you understand that Overture's suggestion tool is primarily an idea generator as its results can be easily skewed by people checking their own positions in Overture's search engine.

CHOOSING YOUR DESCRIPTION & TITLE
The description of your page is usually what the search engines will show the searcher. It basically should summarize your site, and include as many of your keywords as possible. Your title is bascially the same thing, but a much shorter version. Be specific with your titles, they sometimes serve as keywords, depending on the search engine.

COMMON WORDS
Avoid words which have a lot to do with the Net in general. When a user searches for one of these words they get a huge number of results and yours is likely to be way down the list. The purpose of keywords is to target words that will bring people to your site as opposed to other people's. Since nearly every site on the Net is to do with 'web' or 'Internet' or 'services', using these words to target your audience is pretty pointless. Most of the robot-driven engines actively ignore common words like this.

Also, avoid using general words like "Cars". Be specific, "Used cars" is a much better choice. " Used Hondas in Los Angeles" is an even better choice.

KEYWORD PHRASES
These days there are so many pages on the Web that users usually search for 'strings' of at least two or three related words at once, for example "california carpet fitters". Now, if you have all three words on your list separately, you'll be listed below somebody else's page if they've targeted all three words together, in a Keyword Phrase. In the above example you would treat "california carpet fitters" as one word which just happens to have space characters in it.

A website is like a garden, you must water it for it to grow.

Search engine stuff is a big subject but yes, I do have some basic Phrizbie pointers that have worked for us and many of our clients over the years. Meta Tags are important but.... The KEY to good rankings besides submitting is having repetition of keywords in the content of the website. This means the text, image names, titles of the pages, meta tags, and ALT tags. They all must work together to create something the search engines decide is “RELEVANT”. Like for our site, if you type in logo design, I am like # 200 or I don’t even know what, but if you type in “Spa Logo Design” im like #4, because I am really specific what I do. The more specific you can be the better. There are so many tools to help you improve or OPTIMIZE your site and all it's content, this great tool from webmaster-toolkit.com Meta Tag Generator will read the page you specify, remove common words from it, and pick the most used words on the page. It will then generate a Meta Keywords tag using the words it has found. Extra weight will be given to words in a heading tag. Remember images do nothing for "content relevancy", which is what search engines look for in

See the blue box to the right for help choosing your terms wisely. If we design your site we will ask  you for your list of keywords.

To help you choose the best possibly search terms, you can research that here with this free tool from Overture. Click Here!

Another great took for checking keyword relevancey can be found here from webmaster-toolkit.com. Below is a basic diagram of how the whole thing works and who gets the greatest chance of maintaining good rankings.

Google is the top dog in the search engine kennel, not only is google.com one of the most popular search sites, but Google also shares some resultswith Yahoo and Netscape, so if your listed in Google, your listed in those sites too! It takes anywhere from 3 days to 3 weeks to be included in Google. To submit your site go to http://www.google.com/addurl.html but we suggest using G-Boost for guaranteed entry.

See more about submission programs on our "all about search engine guides" page

There is more though...

What does a meta tag look like?

• <META name="resource-type" content="document">
  • The only resource type that is currently in use is "document" This is the only tag that you need to put in for indexing purposes, but use of the others is a good idea.

• <META name="description" content="a description of your page">
  • Depending on the search engine, this will be displayed along with the title of your page in an index. "content" could be a word, sentence or even paragraph to describe your page. Keep this reasonably short, concise and to the point. However, don't be so mean with your description that its not an appropriate reflection of the contents!

• <META name="keywords" content="a, list, of, keywords">
  • Choose whatever keywords you think are appropriate, seperated by commas. Remember to include synoyms, americanisms and so on. So, if you had a page on cars, you might want to include keywords such as car, cars, vehicles, automobiles and so on.

• <META name="distribution" content="one of several">
  • Content should contain either global, local or iu (for Internal Use). To be perfectly honest, I can't quite get my head around this one; its supposed to list available resources designed to allow the use to find things easily, but I still don't quite get it. My advice is to stick to "global".

Are there optional tags?

Yup, theres a whole bunch of 'em. I've put in a couple of examples below that I think are helpful for many of my clients. If you dont understand this, dont worry - just tell Gillian you want her to include the extra Meta Tags.

• <META name="copyright" content="copyright statement"
  • Pretty obvious what this one's for.

• <META HTTP-EQUIV="varname" content="data"
  • This binds the varname to an HTTP header field. An http server might use this to process a document. This one's a tad more tricky.If you included the following example:
    <META HTTP-EQUIV="keywords" content="car,cars"
    then, as part of a GET command the server would include the word car and cars in the HTTP response header.

• <META HTTP-EQUIV="refresh" content="0; url=homepage.htm"
  • This can be used in the HEAD section of the index.html file to redirect it to homepage.htm. The figure after content is the time in seconds that the browser waits before moving on.

There are a few others that you can include, such as "revisit-after" and "rating" if you want to be really comprehensive.

Questions about the meta tag

Can I put my competitors name(s) in my meta tags?
Sounds like a good idea when you first think of it doesn't it? I mean, if you put your competitors names in your meta tags, and someone searches for them, they may find you instead and buy a product from you, rather than them. Unfortunately, life isn't that simple. In the UK (where I'm based) there are laws against passing yourself off as another company - I wouldn't get very far if I tried to open a shop called Harrods, for example. You'll find that putting in meta tags is probably going to be regarded in exactly the same way by the British courts. (Please bear in mind here that I'm not a lawyer, and I'm not giving legal advice; this is just my opinion.)

Should I put meta tags on every page, or just meta tags on the home or index page?
Put them on every page that you create and publish. The search engines will find all your pages and if you want to stand a good chance of them ranking your pages highly, you'll want to put the meta tag element on each of them. Submitting each page is actually the best thing to do but of course this takes alot of time.

Where can I get more information?

What - you mean all my hard work above isn't enough for you? OK. Some sites that I've identified that might be of further use are:

• Dictionary of meta tags and a list of RFC sources
  • This is a (yuck!) frames site, but has lots of useful stuff. It gets technical quickly, so be warned.

• A meta tag builder
  • Useful site which will create a set of meta tags based on information you provide. Useful if you're not sure of how to do it.

• OCLC/NCSA Metadata workshop
  • This provides information on the catalogue record element known as the 'Dublin Core' which looks as though its going to be a very useful advance in the use of the little beasties.

Important!   Remember that your targeted keywords should appear in the text of your site in order to successfully place under those phrases in the search engines. We recommend submitting your site to engines as often as possible. Also periodically check to make sure your homepage content still contains as many keywords as possible, as well as your title. The more times a word repeats, the more "relevant" Google considers the content.

 

To receive a 5% discount enter the promocode "MAFF5PCOFF"

< Back

Close Window

Next >