Important Meta Tags And Web Traffic
Meta tags are more often neglected by most of the webmasters, especially the internet marketers who are designing and promoting their websites. Most of them know the importance of the Meta tags in the search engine optimization (SEO) process, but are unaware of how to use them optimally to get that added advantage of getting a little better result in SEO.
You can use the Meta tags to add to your web page’s importance. Meta tags are simply the HTML elements that the major search engines have always used to index your web page, and classify it among the infinite web sites that are uploaded by millions of people all over the world. The Meta tags convey important and relevant information to the search engines, especially about the content and its relevant keywords.
Many people have foolishly filled up the Meta Keyword tag with plenty of keywords thinking that those many relevant or irrelevant keywords would be processed by the search engines and give them a better ranking in their results.
This never happens! There are different issues that the search engines broadly apply when they process the different types Meta tags. Then, every search engines have their own algorithms which differ from other major search engines. Some still use the Meta Keyword tag while others do not give any importance to them. Hence, the influence that your Meta tags can have on the search engines for getting ranking varies.
Some Meta tags like the Meta Keyword tag and the Meta Description tag are not used by many search engines, especially Google. But there are still other Meta tags that are use by these top search engines to rank web pages.
The Meta tags are necessary part of the on-page search engine optimization, and most of the Meta tags are really important. Yet due to being used as spamming the search engines, many Meta tags have lost some of its importance. Yet, the search engines are known to change their algorithms very frequently and they may begin to give importance to all the Meta tags, only if these Meta tags fulfill their no-spam criteria.
Hence, plan your SEO process well and give attention to the Meta tags as well as a part of the SEO process. A good use of Meta tags will at least not do any harm to your SEO process and may give added benefits if the search engines change their algorithms and include all the Meta tags.
If some of those Meta tags are being used cleverly, then your SEO effort gets the needed boost in the SEO process. Let’s find out which Meta tags can help you and which cannot at present.
Meta Keyword Tag
A Meta keyword tag is used to help the search engines to associate the keywords in this Meta keyword tag with the content of the web page. Meta keyword tag contains all the keywords and key-phrases included within the website’s HTML in the Head-section and are generally invisible to the readers, but the search engines can view them. They can be found out if the source code of the page is viewed.
The Meta keyword tag is a list of all the web page’s important keywords. These keywords should be placed in the Meta keyword tag according to their importance in the web page’s content. These keywords should also be present in the first and the last paragraphs of the content, and should be “sprinkled” throughout the content without spamming, that is, the keywords should be placed as relevant words and should be able to help the web page’s content to produce sensible reading.
The density of these keywords should not exceed 5% to 6%, and therefore, you must take care not to include a lot of keywords in the Meta Keyword tag. If you do so, then including those keywords in the content would become render the content confusing because you then also will have to write each keyword at least 5 to 6 times to get up to about 5 percent density. So, include just about 4 to 5 important keywords maximum, and write the content accordingly. This will help the search engines to associate your keywords with your content and rank the web page much higher.
Suppose that the web site is about cheap web hosting service and the Meta tags can include, for example:
<html>
<head>
<title>Cheap Web Hosting Service</title>
<meta name="keywords" content="cheap web hosting service, shared inexpensive web hosting,
budget web hosting, cheap hosting">
<meta name="description" content="Our cheap web hosting service can provide you with
shared inexpensive web hosting that guarantees 99.5 percent uptime and 24x7 top class professional support.">
…
</head>
…
Then, fill the content with relevant information about the cheap web hosting service, for example, and its specific features that includes the “99.5 percent uptime guarantee”, the “24×7 top class professional support”, etc. Of course, you will also have to write these keywords 5 to 6 times to make up the required 5% density so that the web page can rank high in the search engine result pages. So, keep the Meta keyword tags below 5 (or even lower) to make them manageable while writing the content.
Of course, no search engine will give you a high ranking based solely on the keywords and their density. There are other factors which decide the search engine ranking. But, the keywords definitely play a major part in getting the rank through the on-page search engine optimization, even if the Meta keywords tags may be ignored by some search engines.
It is also important to remember to keep your Meta keyword tag short. Limit it to between 950 and 1,000 characters long. Also remember to include the following to impress the search engines and help your web page get a lot of visitors:
- Use the Meta keyword tag to list your website’s important keywords and key-phrases and also the web page’s important keywords and key-phrases which could be slightly different from each other.
- Always remember to list your keywords in their order of importance.
- Don’t spam the search engines by including a lot of keywords, or by copying the same keywords multiple times in the Meta keyword tag. The search engines will quickly punish your website for spamming it by either de-listing your website and web pages, or by removing the web pages to its cache pages where usually no search engine reader visits.
The Meta keyword tag, along with the Meta Description tag plays important part in the on-page SEO. These two Meta tags are the most important along with, perhaps, the Meta Title tag.
Meta Description Tag
Although not all the search engines use the Meta description tag and they may use only the first 2 or 3 lines of your content to form the description for their viewers as the summary of the web page, the Meta description tag still is an important part of the HTML web page. As seen earlier, the Meta keyword tag provides the keywords list to the search engines and in the same way, the Meta description tag provides the search engine with a summary of the web page’s content.
This summary is displayed to the search engine’s viewers along with the title of the web page and the URL of the web page. So, a proper description will help your web page get a lot of clicks and visits from the search engine because these tags impress the viewers of the search engine with good and professional-looking words contained in them. Ideally, your web page’s first paragraph should contain your best keywords and should be written in a very professional style to impress the search engine’s readers.
