Meta Tags (Keyword and Description) and the Title Tag are an absolute essential for any page to get top ranks in the search engines. In fact this is a very important criterion the search engines take into consideration before deciding to give rank to a page with respect to a keyword.

We discuss them one by one.

The Meta Keyword Tag:

The Meta Keyword tag is written like this:

<META NAME=”Keywords” CONTENT=”keyword1, keyword2, …., keywordX”>

Where keyword1, keyword2, …., keywordX are important keyword phrase with respect to the site.

Note: The Meta Keyword Tag is not displayed to the viewer while browsing. It’s there for certain technical reason. An explanation is beyond the scope of this article, but know that it does help in search engine ranking – therefore we are discussing it here!

Some of the search engines ignore this tag, however it doesn’t take much on your part to include it. Search engines that give importance to the Meta Keyword Tags look for it.

Punching this tag with a lot of Keywords reduces the weight of this Tag. The search engines might even ignore them. Also, repetition of the same keyword more than twice is unnecessary. The best idea would be to write the most important keyword in upper as well as lower case. For example, “search engine optimization, search engine, SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION”.

Suppose your site deals in online booking of hotel rooms in the US. You have one page dedicated to hotels in Florida. You can write

<META NAME=”Keywords” CONTENT=”hotels in florida, US Hotels, Florida accommodation, US accommodations, HOTELS IN FLORIDA”>

Note that none of the keywords is repeated more than twice and somehow we achieve the target of pushing the most important keywords. There is no need to stuff this tag with a lot of keywords – even the search engines that do recognize the Meta Keyword Tag will ignore them.

You can repeat some very popular and important keywords in different pages of your website. It does make your site stronger for that keyword. Keep in mind not to include this keyword in any page that has absolutely nothing to do with the meaning of the keyword. The index page is the best example. Your index page is the most important page for the search engines. Since the index page contains the general information of your business/site you can include the most popular keywords here. It’s recommended you include the top 10 keywords in the index page. Repeat these keywords in the respective page meant to target that portion of your business. For example the index page could contain the keyword “Hotels in Florida” and a page that is dedicated to online booking/information in hotels in Florida could also contain this keyword.

The Bottom Line – even if not-so-important tag, do include the Keyword Meta Tags in all of your web pages. No need to stuff this tag with a lot of keywords.

We can write Meta Tags for your website for upto 10 pages for $10 only. This is what we will do:

• Research your site and come up with highly efficient 10 keywords. These keywords will get you good traffic in the long run.

• Write Meta Tags (Description and Keywords tag) and Title Tag for these keywords that you can implement in 10 pages of your website.

The Meta Description Tag:

The Meta Description Tag is written like this:<META NAME=”Description” CONTENT=”Describe your site in a single line here.”>Where in the CONTENT part you write the description of your website in general and the page in particular. Note that your description should not exceed 20 words. Try to make it less than 20 words. Actually you can write a long description but the search engines are too busy to check what’s written approximately after that many words, so anything after 20 words is ignored.

Note: The Meta Description Tag too is not displayed to the viewer, but it does help tremendously in search engine ranking. This tag is displayed by most of the search engines in their search results. The surfers read this sentence before they click on to visit your site. Imagine the importance of this tag – a smart description can force a surfer to click on it and a weak one may drive your traffic away!

These 20 odd words carry some serious weight as far as search engine placement is concerned. Try to target the most important keywords within the first 15 words. Your description should be a grammatically correct sentence with no spell errors. Start your description with an upper case letter (just as you would do to write a sentence) and end it with a period. The more your target keyword is near to the beginning of the sentence, the better.

An example:
Lets take the same travel agent site featuring online reservations in the hotels in USA. The page that features accommodation in Florida could include the following description:

<META NAME=”Description” CONTENT=”Florida accommodation – online reservation available with huge discount.”>

The first two words “Florida accommodation” is our important keyword. The description begins with a popular keyword. Online reservation is a general keyword and helps even if somebody types “Florida accommodation online” or “online Florida accommodation”. Note that there is no other keyword ‘diluting’ the importance of the keyword – Florida accommodation. Since this page we assume is dedicated to Florida accommodation there is no need to push any other keyword. Now, read the sentence. Any surfer interested in visiting Florida would click on it.

The index page can contain all the important keywords in its description, but as said earlier do not exceed 20 words.

The Bottom Line – no more than 20 words in a description; grammatically correct sentence; no spelling mistakes; try to start with an important keyword; only the first letter in upper case, of course nouns should begin with upper case.

We can write Meta Tags for your website for upto 10 pages for $10 only. This is what we will do:

• Research your site and come up with highly efficient 10 keywords. These keywords will get you good traffic in the long run.

• Write Meta Tags (Description and Keywords tag) and Title Tag for these keywords that you can implement in 10 pages of your website.