How To Use Meta Tags

It is very important to use unique tags for each page of your content. A unique title, description and keywords tag is crucial to tell the search engines what you want to get across. Be careful not to try and fool them though as they cross reference these meta tags with your sites actual content. As a matter of procedure (it shouldn’t effect how to use meta tags) it is important to use the following meta and title tags in this order: Title, Description and Keywords. Key words are important, but no where near as much as the title and the description. Try using this meta tag analyzer to determine how well your tags are already configured.

Meta Tag Analyzer Tool – http://www.seocentro.com/tools/search-engines/metatag-analyzer.html

For this example we used the tools and found that a couple of our meta tags were too long. Click on the image below for our results:

The green writing shows acceptable use of tags and the red writing shows which adjustments should be made. It is important to stay within the character limit for these areas. This is beneficial not only to Google and other search engines, but also to people reading your results from the S.E.R.P. (Search Engine Results Page).

A really good method for finding out the best practices on how to use meta tags is to look at those with big research budgets and who have been in the industry for a long time. They will have poured millions into their search engines rankings and you can learn a lot from them. For example looking at the GoDaddy search engine results, we can see how neat nice metas will make your site look:

Looking at GoDaddy’s results, we decide to simplify our metas to give a nice clean result in Google and other search engines. In the end we go for

“Green Web Hosting, Domain Names and Website Design – Pivotal Hosting”

Know How To Use Meta Tags

It is really easy in the beginning, as you know your business to try and stuff every element in your site with the keywords you want to rank highly with. We know because we did! We, like everyone have learned from doing and you can learn from our experience and do it right the first time. Here is our site’s results with the changes recommended from this tool:

When we first made our changes we found we were no longer as relevant with our main content. After some evaluation and changes to our meta tags we managed to get our results to an acceptable percentage of above 75 percent all round. This percentage applies to the relevance of our site to our description. Once this is done and re-uploaded to your server you can do one of two things.

Once You Know How To Use Meta Tags You Can

• We recommend waiting if your search engine is already indexed. To many site submissions to the same search engine can get your site blacklisted.
• Submit your site to the search engines for indexing if you haven’t already. This can generally be done by going to the search engine and searching for ‘Submit Site’ either in the page or in the search field.

The submit pages for a few of the top search engines are below:

Google –http://www.google.co.uk/addurl/?continue=/addurl

Yahoo –http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit

AltaVista – As above (Search by AltaVista is powered by Yahoo Search)

Ask Jeeves – To get a human editor to review your site for inclusion, you must send an email to [email protected] requesting an evaluation of your site. Be sure to be comprehensive in your submission as they are quite selective about their manual inclusion. Automated inclusion is from crawling only and works well when you know how to use meta tags.