Back to Search engine optimization guide - part 2
Meta tags like title tags are tags which are embedded in the HTML of a page. However they are not as important as title tags because only a handful of search engines use them as a factor when determining the relevancy of a page. They still must be included in all your webpages however to get maximum results from the search engines.
There are two types of meta tags which search engines look at, the meta keywords tag and the meta description tag. Simply put the keywords tag contains your keywords and keyphrases and the description tag contains a keyphrase rich description of your site.
Here's the HTML needed for the meta keywords tag.
Now here's the HTML need for the meta description tag.
Again these tags have to be included between the two head tags
Let's start with the keywords tag, this is where you list words and phrases related to your website theme. You will see above that I have included my main keyphrase right at the start of the tag - "Internet Marketing Articles", this is because some search engines will see words that start early in the keywords tag as more important than ones just before the end of the tag.
The search engines that use the meta keywords tag all differ when it comes to this assigning relavency to words within the tag, but they all seem to rate pages with short to medium length keywords tag better, so I would suggest that you keep your keywords meta tag between 150 to 250 characters.
I have a lot less than 250 characters in the example keywords tag I give above this is because I do not want to dilute the importance of "Internet Marketing Articles" by including lots of words which I have not placed elsewhere on my page.
Don't repeat a word more than 3-5 times in your tag because most search engines nowadays will see this a spamming and could penalize you in the form of poor ranking or complete exclusion from their database.
The reason that the keywords meta tag is not widely used by search engines is because the text in this tag cannot be seen by visitors to a website. Therefore the search engines feel this tag will be abused, by webmasters placing lots of unrelated words within it in order to get more visitors.
However using the keywords tag in conjunction with other areas of your page can help your ranking. Imagine for example if your main keyphrase was "Internet Marketing Articles" and someone typed in that phrase in a search engine that supports meta tags. The search engine would search its database, see that you have the keyphrase "Internet Marketing Articles" in your title tag and a few times in the body of your page, then it will take into account that you have "Internet marketing articles" in your keywords tag too.
So alone keywords/keyphrases in a keywords meta tag will not give you extra relevancy. It will however help to reassure search engines that a page is relevant to the words being searched for.
Regarding the meta description tag, this is what some search engines use when your site is returned in the results for a certain search term. Without it search engines could take the first few lines of code from your page, which mightn't appear so good to the searcher. Hence you should always put a short 10-20 word description of your page in this tag. Make sure your most important keywords are at the start of your description because some search engines will truncate it to suit their own needs.
Don't stuff it with keywords, it's more important for the description to sound right and professional than to have it filled with keywords. Imagine doing a search for something and the site ranked number 1 had a description filled with keywords. Would you click on it? I wouldn't. The bottom line is that description tags will be read by searchers so make sure it doesn't sound unprofessional or just plain stupid.
Continue to Search engine optimization guide - part 4