Las Vegas Internet Services - What Are Meta Tags

Meta tags are areas of text that are hidden from the viewer of a page but accessible to browsers and robots. They are located in the <head> section of the html code. Robots use meta tags to find out more about a web page, so they can effect the search ranking.

Title Tag
The title is not technically a meta tag but search engines use this as well. The maximum length is 60 characters. Also search engines will look at page content a place more importance on the words at the beginning of each page.

Description Meta Tag
The description tag is a paragraph which describes your web page should be a maximum of 150 characters long. Make sure that the most important keywords are nearer the beginning as some search engines will not index all of the words in the description.

Keywords Meta Tag
The keywords tag is a list of keywords and phases separated by commas related to your web maximum 874 characters. Some of the major search engines do not look at this tag anymore due to the amount of people trying to increase their search engine ranking by added unrelated words in the keywords meta tag. It is still worth using this tag but you should only use words and phrases that are on the web page and do not repeat a word more that three times. It may be useful to put common misspellings and synonyms in this tag.

Example:

head>
<meta name="ROBOTS" CONTENT="ALL">
<meta name="revisit-after" content="30 days">
<meta name="description" content="Description of your site">
<meta name="keywords" content="keywords separated with commas ">
<title>Put your page title here </title>
</head>

The first tag tells the search engine spiders and robots to look at all of the pages on your web site.
The next tag tells the robots to come back every 30 days.

Other useful Tags
To improve your rankings with some search engines you should also use header tags and alt tags. Both of these tags are used in the main body of your web page. The header tag indicates a heading and the alt tag enables you to attach some text to an image. This text can only be seen when the mouse is held over the image.

Example:

<h2> Page heading containing important key phase </h2>
<IMG SRC="path of image file" ALT="Keyword, keyword phrase etc">

What are the Best Keywords to use?
If you want to find out what keywords and phrases are being searched for use the Search Term Suggestion Tool.
Overture has approximately 4% of the top 20 search engine traffic so if you multiple the numbers by 25 this is a rough idea of how many people are searching for these keyword per month. Once you have decided on your keywords and phases make sure they are included in the main body text on your page (try and get the most important in the first paragraph), then add them to the keywords meta tag. Add the most import phrase to the title tag and include the best few phrases in the description tag. More Keyword tools