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Search Engine Visibility:
What are Meta Tags?
Meta tags are the confusing html coding that search engines such as Yahoo and Google use to "spider" (or skim through) your website to rank them according to how 'key word worthy' they decide you are.
If you are looking at a website on the internet in Internet Explorer, click on VIEW, SOURCE and you will see a funny popup window with very strange coding. This is HTML code. If you go to any website and click on VIEW, SOURCE, you will see the META TAGS.
- TITLE META TAG - The TITLE meta tag and is considered, expecially by GOOGLE to be the most important tag in the website. It's crucial that you have your most important keywords in that meta tag. Your title meta tag can be appx. 10 - 12 words long. You can use your keywords more than once but be careful or search engines will consider it spam.
It looks like this: <"title">TEXT HERE<"/title">
- DESCRIPTION META TAG - the next important is called the description tag. In the description meta tag be sure that you use important key words and phrases also but do not over-use them or you can easily be kicked out of a search engine's database. You can put a couple of good sentences in this area...
It looks like this: <"meta name="description" content="TEXT HERE .">
- KEYWORD META TAG -these are the least important meta tags and hardly worth discussing but ...... use good keywords and phrases separated by commas.
It looks like this: <"meta name="keywords" content="TEXT, TEXT, TEXT, TEXT.">
When you do a website, mixup your meta tags by putting different ones in each html page. If you do this, you will get the most bang for your buck!
NOTE: in my above examples, Please do not copy and paste these into your coding since I had to include some invalid characters to make it show up for you in this page....it will not be valid if you use my above examples...
It's important to know that just inserting meta tags is not enough!! Search engines like Google look at your meta tags but they also consider good text on your pages just as important!!
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