by Justin Harrison

Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of every web designer’s key steps in creating, maintaining, and promoting a valuable high-traffic website. Freeing you from the necessity of spending thousands of your dollars on promotion advertising, search engine optimization enables you to grow your traffic organically as your page rankings rise. What many web designers only learn after years of experience, however, is the powerful difference meta tags can make in how your pages rank.

There is no facet of search engine optimization more frequently overlooked than ensuring meta tags are placed on every page. Meta tags, written into the code of your page so that they are not visible to visitors, provide the search engines with specific identifiers for the page. Some websites create listings almost entirely with meta tags, yet many site owners never implement them to full effect.

There are different kinds of meta tags that impact SEO. Take, for instance, the META KEYWORDS tag. This meta tag provides a list of keywords to spiders, telling them what the website is all about. If you visit NYTimes.com and right click on the page, and then click on “View Page Source,” you will find a meta tag about half down the first page reading META KEYWORDS. This tag will show you a long list of keywords starting with “New York Times, international news, daily newspaper, national news?” and so on. The keyword list contains dozens of words that relate to this particular paper but also to papers in general.

Most search engines detect these keywords in content, too, but it can be helpful for you to include keywords that are especially low-density in text, such as odd spellings of names and places, related topics not specifically discussed on the page, and any other keywords you have trouble injecting into your content in a user-friendly way.

Another important tag is the META DESCRIPTION tag. This tag is used by the engines to present information about your website when it appears in search results. Most engines allow 160 characters here, and this is a place you can include keywords to boost your page rankings for targeted phrases.

There are also other meta tags, but these two are vital for SEO. It is important that you maximize your use of META KEYWORDS and META DESCRIPTION tags by making sure you do not cram them with words unrelated to your content or use the same keywords too many total times on the same page. Putting in too many keywords will cause the search engines to penalize your pages as spam. Not using enough keywords is almost as bad.

Finally, be sure you use different meta tags for every page. It is useful to target tags to the content included on a particular page. If you repeat meta tags throughout your site, you will not benefit from valuable differences in keywords on particular pages.

About the Author:
Justin Harrison is a leading Internet Marketing consultant responsible for the Internet Marketing strategies behind some of the biggest online brands including Amazon, BBC, MasterCard and many others.

Tagged with: