Keyword Optimization - Part IV (Meta tags)
Next comes the
infamous Meta tags.
How important
are they in search engine optimization ?
It is
difficult to say, but these Meta tags have importance to Meta search engines, which use it for indexing
and ranking web pages.
The
major search engines are corporate bodies, with millions of dollars of
investment, and with the ability to hire hundreds of Software
Engineers, who
could create very good algorithms and code, to index and rank web
pages.
These
search engines would not only rely on Meta tags alone, but
the entire contents of the page, in their judgment, to serve the most
relevant
and quality web pages to their users.
So, the
usefulness of Meta tags are there, in the overall scheme of
search engine optimization,
and not alone.
Only quality
original content and number and quality of incoming
links are the most important factors.
But if a web
page, have these, than it
would do well to complement the page, by adding descriptive Meta tags to it.
The Meta tags that are of relevance to search
engines are the <META name=" " content=" "> tags.
These are
usually
placed in the head portion of a HTML document as shown below.
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>.....</TITLE>
<META name=" " content=" ">
</HEAD>
<BODY>
.................
.................
.................
</BODY>
</HTML>
The Meta tag names are usually
"name="description"" and
"name="keywords"", which gives the description of the web
page and the keywords that are associated with it.
For example, if
one had a
web page, which dealt with "vacationing in Europe", they could have Meta tags as below.
<META name="description" content="Traveling
and vacationing in the continent Europe"
<META name="keywords" content="Europe, travel, agency, vacation, holiday,
continent, getaway">
Care must be taken, to ensure that each keyword is separated with a
",".
Also one should make sure that the description does not exceed 100
characters,
and that the keyword list does not exceed a reasonable number like 8.
One could
also, optionally use the following Meta tag
<META name="Author"
content="Author's-name">
There are many
other Meta tags, but their description is beyond the
scope of search engine
optimization.