Essential tips to market your web site- Meta Tags

It is no longer sufficient to merely create a fantastic web page for your business or product and hope that users will find and respond to it. There are literally billions of web pages online all competing for market prominence in terms of search engine ranking. One has to have a certain degree of knowledge about SEO or search engine optimization and how to apply these techniques to your pages in order to ensure that search engines like Google index your page correctly and place them as high as possible on the search engine rankings in order to make  them visible to people searching for your product or service.

Basically, SEO refers to the techniques and the various rules that affect search engines optimization. In other words it is all about optimizing your web site to achieve the highest possible search engine visibility.

There are many aspects to search engine optimization and ideally one should employ an SEO expert to audit your web site and implement the necessary optimization strategies. However, there are some basic SEO techniques that one can implement that will often have a dramatic affect on one’s search engine ranking. This article is one of a series that will deal with various important elements of web page optimization- the following is an overview of some of the essentials of

Meta Tags.

One should pay attention to what is termed on-page optimization. This means that certain aspects of your web page design and structure should meet search engine requirements.  One of the most important of these is to ensure that your Meta Tags are properly utilized. Meta Tags are the sections of code that appear in the header section of the web page. The text that you insert in these tags is intended to provide certain targeted and key information about the site or web page – which is also used by the search engines to index and determine the placement of your page on the search engine index.

An example of a Meta Tag is as follows:

< head>
< title>Not a Meta Tag, but required anyway < /title>
< meta name=”description” content=”Awesome Description Here”>
< meta http-equiv=”content-type” content=”text/html;charset=UTF-8″>
< /head>

The most important tag is the title tag which should be about seven or eight words in length and not longer than 65 characters in length. The description tag is very important in that it provides a succinct way of telling the viewer about your product or service. This should be about 35 words or less. Meta Keywords are no longer deemed to be important for Google, but are still significant for engines like Bing, Yahoo and others. The keywords should be about seven or eight words in length. A common mistake is to enter dozens of keywords in the hope that this provide higher page ranking. However, more than seven keywords will in fact detract from a good ranking by most search engines.

Special attention should be given to the Meta Description Tag to ensure that this reflects the central keywords that best describe the site. One should also ensure that there is a unique title for every product or service page. This helps the search engine to differentiate between pages on your site.

You should not forget to make use of the useful H1 tag. This tag refers to the most important phrases or sentences in your page. The keywords that pertain to the particular page should be used in this tag. While many webmasters do not include this tag it is important because it is essentially a high level tag that shows what your specific page is about. Search engines generally give this tag more weight than other headings, and it can be instrumental in improving your search engine ranking.  In other words, the search engines will pay more attention to the content in the H1 tag. What is important to remember is that the main keywords for the page should be placed in this tag. It is also vital that the keywords used in the H1 tag should match the keywords in the title of the page. This is a factor that helps the search engines to determine the consistency and validity of the content of the page.

Another useful tip is that in creating your tags you should place the most important keywords that you have selected for that page near the beginning of the tag.

After you have finished optimizing your Meta Tags give yourself a short self-evaluation test. Ask yourself if the title, description and other tags are effective in informing your viewers and possible clients about the main elements of your web page.