What meta tags mean and how to optimize them
Now that you are ready with your online store or website, the question is how will you draw traffic to it? If you can’t draw traffic to your website then however good your product or service is people won’t know it. So the number of hits you get is very important for monetization of your service or website. Let us discuss a few killer ways to bring traffic or increase the number of hits or visitors to your site by doing on-page optimization of your pages. Here we discuss about meta tag optimization.
Meta tag optimization
Meta data means data about data. When a search engine crawls the internet and lands on your page, it reads your meta tags and tries to find what the page is all about from your meta tag. Meta tags can be found in the <head> </head> area of your webpage. The meta description is generally not visible to people who are visiting your website. They are only read by search engine crawlers who visit your webpage. In the meta data area only <title> is viewable in the title bar of the browser.
Typical meta data of a webpage looks somewhat like this :-
<title>Most useful search engine optimization SEO tips FREE</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
<meta name="keywords" content="Search engine optimization SEO tips you can not do without" />
<meta name="description" content="SEO, link building, brand building, on page optimization, off page optimization" />
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" />
<meta http-equiv="pragma" content="no-cache" />
<meta http-equiv="cache-control" content="no-cache" />
<link href="style.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
</head>
It tells the browser about the characterset, the keywords the search engines should index the page for, the title of the page, the page description etc. So be very careful in picking up proper keywords after proper niche research on your area of interest. This will be effective in proper on-page optimization of your website. Now let us take the elements one by one and study their importance.
Title Tags :
Though title tags are a part of the meta tag area of a webpage but it is not actually a meta tag. They are meant to be read by the visitors who visit your webpage. Title tags are generally displayed at the title bar of your browser. Apart from search engines indexing it, they are often displayed when someone adds your page to bookmarks or favourites of their browser. While indexing your webpage the search engines also use the title tag as one of the factors for placing your website in the appropriate category.
Meta description tag :
Meta description tags are generally used as an extension to supplement the title tags. The describe the title tags in greater detail which in turn informs the crawler about what the content of the page is all about. Look at the above example and you will find something which says meta name="description". This is the meta description tag. It is generally advisable to keep this tag about 230 to 250 characters. These 250 characters will be used by the search engines and the rest will be automatically truncated. So it is meaningless to use an exceptionally long description here.
The meta keywords tag :
This tag is generally not supported anymore by major search engines though it adds to the title and description tags. So I would advice you not to leave it out as a whole but to get a nice selection of keywords that defines your page most appropriately. It is also advisable to use words similar in meaning to your keywords in the meta keywords tag. This will actually supplement to your page ranking. For example if you are writing a page about “numismatics” then it would be meaningful to use the words ”coin collection” in your meta keywords tag. It is best to use single words or small phrases separated by commas in your meta keyword description. These are just suggestions but be informed that most search engines now sets little or no value to meta keywords tag.
Meta robots tag :
Look at the example and you won’t find a meta robots tag there. This is because they are not an essential part of meta data. They are used only if you do not want search engines to crawl or browse your webpage. They do not help in any way in indexing or positioning of your webpage in the search engines. There is a more elegant method of instructing the search engines not to index your page or site. This is done now by using the robots.txt file.
Apart from these abovementioned meta tags there are some other meta tags too but they are just ignored by all major search engines. So it is meaningless to discuss them here. So happy meta tag hunting.
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