PDA

View Full Version : Meta Tags


tony10
03-22-2001, 06:19 PM
Man, If you have some time, put up the meta tag. I had alavista come to spider my sites and it is brining each one of my pages like 10 visitors a day.
Here is what you can do:
Before you submit your Web site to the search engines, you should make sure it is ready to be categorized correctly. You can control how search engines catalog your site with two types of HTML tags. These meta tags are part of the HTML code that search engine crawlers look for but visitors to your pages never see.

Description meta tag: Lets you specify a short summary that appears below the webpage's title on a search response. This is what the person sees to decide if what your Web site is worth visiting. It should be your initial sales pitch, so choose your description carefully.
Keyword meta tag: Lets you specify the keywords that a search robot should give precedence to when cataloging the page. keywords are typically given less importance than words in the title, but more importance than words found in the page's body.
These tags typically go between the head tags of an HTML page. Here are some guidelines and tips for selecting keywords:
Make a list of relevant keywords that you think people will search for when they are looking for a Web site like yours.
Make sure your keywords include both general and specific words related to your site.
Your keyword meta tag should be less than 1000 characters in length, including spaces and commas.
If you are finding it difficult to think of keywords that people will enter in their searches, then use a thesaurus and copy some from your competitor's Web sites! By the way, I didn't tell you that.
Make your keywords plural. Add a "s" to the end of keywords. Otherwise if someone types in, lets say "forms", it will not match the keyword "form" in your meta tag. But if the person typed in "form", it will match it with "forms", as the word is contained with your keyword.
List the important keywords first as some search engines give precedence to keywords listed first.
If your keywords are difficult to spell, list various misspellings of the keywords. People will often misspell a search word. So if the misspelt words matches your misspelt keyword then your Web site will appear in the listing, whereas your competitors won't.
Don't repeat keywords too often. Only repeat it about 3/4 times, otherwise you may be penalized.
Don't hide keywords in the background. In the old days, people used to hide keywords by displaying it the same color as the background. So you can not see it on the screen, but it is listed in the page. This tactic worked when search engines were unsophisticated and judged a word's relevance only by the number of times it appeared on a page. Now, most search engines know about this trick and count only the first few occurrences of a keyword or phrase. Search engines will penalize your page, by placing it further down the list or not listing it at all.
Don't use software that generates your pages dynamically. Search engines don't index dynamically generated pages.
Don't use frames. Many search engine crawlers ignore sites that use frames.
Visit searchenginewatch.com. This Web site is packed with information regarding search engines and you will pick up a few tips there.
And finally this is the best tip that I can give you, by far. Go to the web directory, http://www.goto.com, and use their free keyword suggestion tool. Enter in a search term and it will return similar search terms that their visitors have entered to search with. It also gives the number of times that it has been entered, so you also know how popular it is. Neat, huh? And by the way, while you are there, bid for some search terms and it will send you a lot of visitors your way.

Submit your URL: http://vgacd.com/submit.html

Wabanaki Web
04-03-2001, 04:11 PM
Sounds like some good tips, thanks! I have been reading a couple of books on CSS and both of them mention using header tags. This is something people, like myself, overlook. I always figured since the font size tags did the same thing in the display, that is how I made my titles stand out. BUT I didn't know that search engines give greater emphasis on those header tags then they do to regular text. So for anyone who isn't using header tags, start using them!

Johan
08-19-2001, 06:37 PM
I dont agree. I think a marketing report has been cut and pasted by tony10.

If you want hits for free its all to do with content of these:

<Title> a good title and some key words </TITLE>
<H1> A good heading </H1>
<P> A good 2 or 3 paregraphs - use the words from the heading and titles for most hits </P>


...but even from this your page will get at most 5 to 10 hits a day for something unique that people will want to find. Google is good for this and Lycos may give you 2 or 3 hits aday, Altavista 2 hits a day.

If your web site is selling products directly then payed per click is the way to go go.

My sources for the above have come from implementation and marketing of www.futuremovies.co.uk