TopWebSite Search Engines Guide
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TopWebSite Search Engines Guide |
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MetatagsMetatags are lines of code hidden in your web page programming which identify certain aspects of a web page. They were originally used when teams of programmers spent lots of time creating web pages, to allow them to identify at what stage a page was at any time. Because these metatags often contained relevant information identifying the web page's content and purpose, early search engines used the metatags to index the page and sort them into what we now know to be search results. While metatags certainly help to optimise a page, they are not as relevant today as they were. Metatags include the page title, a short description of the page, keywords that are relevant to the page, the author and lots more. They are not the secret weapon to engine ranking that many people assume, just an element which needs to be included. A web page consists of lines of programming code which is interpreted by the various browsers into a viewable page layout. The actual design may be done on one of many Web Design software packages or written directly into a word processor and saved as an .html file. The HTML document consists of a header section and a body section. The Header generally contains information which is used by search engines, spiders and so on. This is where the metatags go, in between the <HEAD> and the </HEAD> sections. The body section contains the coding for the text and images presented to the viewer. The most common Metatags are listed here.
To achieve a high position it is best to concentrate on a small number of words and include them in the title, description and keyword metatags as well as at the start of your web page. As more keywords are added, the relevance of each is diluted resulting in a lower score by the search engine algorithm. Success has also been observed with pages which include only a <TITLE> metatags and very little else. This technique works best with Altavista but is an option to try when creating doorway pages. Some search engines ignore the metatags altogether and concentrate on what the viewer sees in their web browser. Include your keywords in the top line of text on the page. Each engine is different and it is necessary to experiment with each to achieve an overall high position. However achieving top spot by optimising for one engine will not necessarily mean that the same page hits top spot in another. Avoid the temptation to stuff too many words in here and avoid repeating your keywords as this may be considered spamming by some engines resulting in your site being blacklisted, penalised or banned. Find out more about spamming here. |
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Metatags explained in our Search Engines Guide to metatags from TopWebSite