Meta tags are perhaps the biggest misconception for people just starting out online.   A very common question about websites goes as follows:

“I just created my website and I chose my keyword meta-tags.  I also paid a few hundred dollars to get listed in the search engines.  Why is my website not showing up in Google?”

Well, probably because keyword meta-tags and search engine submissions have almost NOTHING to do with getting ranked highly in Google, Yahoo or MSN (the three top search engines in the world).

The point of this week’s SEO Exciter Series video is to explain the what meta tags ARE and ways to use them to your advantage (and believe it or not, meta tags have very little to do with Search Engine Optimization!).

Let’s break some of the meta-tags down a little bit:

<title> Tag - This is actually is a pseudo-meta-tag and it is perhaps the only important one there is.  This tag is crucial in SEO.  Make sure you have a title tag on your website, for one!  This is the text that appears at the top border of your browser.  Major search engines provide a lot of emphasis on what the title of your web page is.  It is important!  And make sure you have some of your best keywords in your title.  Use a pipe (|) to potentially separate out keywords.  Just keep it under 70 Characters.

Why?  Because that is the maximum number of characters Google will display on a search engine results page (75 for MSN, 118 for Yahoo).  Remember that your title IS the heading of your search engine listing.

<meta name=”keywords” content=”some keywords”> - Meta keywords mean virtually nothing.  In the old days, meta keywords were used to identify relevancy of keywords to websites. Not anymore.  There are too many websites.  And frankly, search engines don’t WANT to give the websites the options to choose there own keywords (though, SEO is our way around this!).

Some old search engines do still use these keyword meta-tags (called Meta Search Engines), but who cares!  We want the big boys (and still, competition makes using these keywords redundant, even for the meta search engines).

In fact, placing your “good, money” keywords in your meta tags is a way to advertise to your competition what is making money for you.  If you use keyword meta-tags, keep them generic and for God’s sake, don’t place any of your secret keywords here! (unless it is in one of my niches…where I WILL find it and use it!)

<meta name=”description” content=”some description”> The description meta tag IS important, but not too much to SEO.  This (in most cases) is what Google and the other search engines display as the result description.  The words used in the description aren’t used too much for SEO, but the effectiveness of getting the user to click your link is crucial!  This is your ad-copy to your Google listing!  The more people that click on your link the better. This is about conversion!

(And keep this under 150 characters…that is Google’s max!  Else, it will dot-dot-dot (…) the rest!)

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”> -This is the true ANTI-SEO tag!  This is telling the search engines NOT to index this webpage.  This does have its use if you are creating private pages or pages that you wish NOT to get ranked (like your terms and conditions, your help desk, your contact details, your shopping cart, etc.).

This is different from the robots.txt file.  I won’t get into this here, but this is a file that instructs search engines HOW to spider your website.  Cool stuff, but it doesn’t have much to do with meta-tags.

And there are many other meta-tags out there, too.  Most won’t help or hurt you in any way.  These four, above, do have an impact on your website (SEO or not) and you should be aware of them all.

cheers…matt

P.S. Sorry about the sound quality.  I fix this is part 4…which you can watch right now…

All 10 Parts (with full downloadable transcriptions) are now available to watch for free!

Go to: Meta Tags and Search Engine Rankings

http://www.SEOExciter.com

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