subject: Seo Basics: The Truth About Meta Tags [print this page] SEO Basics: The Truth about Meta Tags SEO Basics: The Truth about Meta Tags
I really like the topic of SEO, because no matter what perspective, view, knowledge or insight that I have Its always right, and its always wrong! Here is why There are basics of SEO that all SEO Experts know about and utilize, like the notorious Meta tag, but what is controversial is everything else. I say controversial because experts and novices alike cannot agree to the grand prize or cookie cutter approach. I happen to like cookie cutters, because I can copy and paste between sites and they will always hit #1 on Google. Well, not always, actually this approach works about one-percent or less. So, how to we rate well? We use what has worked in the past, or what we see on other websites. Yes, you need to view the page source for websites that rank very high on Google and the other search engines. This isn't cheating, just utilizing the tools available to us.
Below is an example from one of my blogs that I set up deliberately to test the Meta-Tags. This setup of Meta-Tags worked for me and obtained the results that I wanted. I received traffic, without advertising! Free is always the ultimate goal for a small business on a very limited budget.
Lets go ahead and start dissecting the Meta-Tags and see if there is really any benefit to utilizing them.
http://submit2500.blogspot.com/
Title:
Free Site Submit
This should portray your website or blog, but also be optimized for keyword popular. So, since my blog is for Free Site Submit, it states it in the title. If you checkout the keyword list at the bottom of this post, the keywords in the title are searched 16,600,000 times per month
Meta Content Description:
This is the basic description of your site or blog, and again, should be keyword optimized. Keep it short, to the point and easy to understand.
Meta Content Keywords:
I have 13 keywords listed, with a couple that are excessively long sentence fragments. This was a mistake when I initially created the Meta-tags, but it didn't seem to harm my search rating, so I left them intact. Complete search engine suicide by every SEO that I have spoken with. The rule of thumb is to list a max of 10 keywords that are specifically chosen to be identified by the search engines, and yes, the search engines crawl your sites looking for these.
Meta Content Google Site Verification:
These are the easy ones In order to acquire this series of letters and numbers, you must manually register your site with Google, under their Webmasters Tool Section. BAM, Google sees me. Yea!!! Doesn't mean that you will be first, just that Google knows that you exist. Its kind of like the bad part of town, or the rich neighborhoods. Here is an example: Hollywood, CA. This is where rich, snooty people live. Maybe, I've never been there, but you have to be banking millions a year to buy a house in that area. Yes? Actually this is a stereotype, because I've driven through some parts of the acclaimed Hollywood, CA and I locked the doors on my beat-up Chevy truck.
Meta Content MSN Site Verification:
Again, manually register your site with MSN.
Meta Content Yahoo Site Verification:
And again, manually register your site with Yahoo.
Meta Content Robots:
Noodp and Noydir informs the DMOZ directory an Yahoo search engines to Not list generic Meta content to the other search engine. As you are probably aware, there are 1,000s of search engines and most of them are fed Meta-Data from DMOZ and Yahoo. Slurp, is used for Yahoo, to ensure that they use the descriptions from your Meta-Tags instead of places like old cached pages.
Keywords:
Here is a list of keywords that receive between 368,000 and 16,600,000 hits per month, according to Google Adwords Keyword tool. Its free also!!!
free site submission (16,600,000 Searches Per Month)
