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Tuesday, September 13, 2011

IV. Metatags

What are Meta tags ?

Meta tags are used to summarize information of a page for search engine crawlers. This information is not directly visibles to humans visiting your website. The most popular are the meta keywords and description tag. These meta tags to be inserted into the area of your page.
A couple of years ago meta tags were the primary tool for search engine optimization and there was a direct correlation between keywords in the meta tags and your ranking in the search results. However, algorithms have got better and today the importance of metadata is decreasing day by day.

Meta Description

The meta Description tag is are one more way for you to write a description of your site, thus pointing search engines to what themes and topics your Web site is relevant to. Some search engines (including Google) use these meta description display a summary of the listings on the search results page. So if your meta descriptions are well written you might be able to attract more traffic to your website.
For instance, for the dog adoption site, the meta Description tag could be something like this:
<Meta Name=“Description“ Content=“Adopting a dog saves a life and brings joy to your house. All you need to know when you consider adopting a dog.“>

Meta Keywords

A potential use of the Meta Keywords tags is to include a list of keywords that you think are relevant to your pages. The major search engines will not take this into account but still it is a chance for you to emphasize your target keywords. You may consider including alternative spellings (or even common misspellings of your keywords) in the meta Keywords tag. It might be a very small boost to your search engine rankings but why miss the chance?
eg.
<Meta name=“Keywords“ Content=“adopt, adoption, dog, dogs, puppy, canine, save a life, homeless animals“>

Meta Robots

In this tag you specify the pages that you do NOT want crawled and indexed. It happens that on your site you have contents that you need to keep there but you don't want it indexed. Listing this pages in the Meta Robots tag is one way to exclude them (the other way is by using a robots.txt file and generally this is the better way to do it) from being indexed.
eg.
<META NAME=“ROBOTS“ CONTENT=“NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW“>

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