Blogging - What Is and How to Use META Tags
Feb 2008 | Category: Make Money Blogging
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First, let’s make sure that we have the same understanding of what we are talking about 
. In case you have your source code page viewed, you can find the meta tags between the <head> and </head> section. Their prefix looks like <meta…. /> or <META… />.
There are the meta tags in my code. If you didn’t find any, then you don’t have or misplaced them and I suggest you to add some. If you want to know why, read on. But if you want to skip the intro and see what are the tags you need to add, skip a few line below.
Meta tags
So, what are meta tags? The search engine comes with a ton of definitions, but in english, they are tags used to introduce search engine bots to our site and tell them how deep we want them to know our site and other things to do with our site. What I mean is, we can allow or disallow crawlers from accessing certain pages of our site so they won’t appear on search engine results. Why do we want to do that? You’ll know later…
The common meta tags and the most reasonable to be used are listed below. There are actually more meta tags available, but most of them are now not supported by search engine crawlers thus it is useless to have them embedded on the source code. While some of them are only created for special purposes that generally most blogs/sites won’t need to use them.
- <meta name=”keyword” content=”…”>
This meta tag supports the information acquired by crawler bots. It used to be where the robots look for information of what a page is about, but now major search engine robots prefer to read the entire page than depending its result to keyword tags. So, why should you include this tag? Because not all search engine robots ignore this tag. Some still refer to it and we want our site to rank well on as many as search engines, right?
For those search engines that support this tag, having a keyword related to your content included in the tag might boost a page a higher rank for the keyword. For example, you had a page about picking up a domain name and the word “choosing a domain name” is scattered all over the article. Then, having a meta keyword tag like <meta name=”keyword” content=”choosing a domain name”> may get your page a better rank for that word. But remember, you should use the words you include in the meta tag or it is useless if there are so many keywords in the tag, but none of them is mentioned on the page.
I said too many would be useless because you can get banned from search engine’s index. However, including several (1-3) words that aren’t mentioned at all on the page can increase the odds of people finding your page using any words that are not contained in your page (this is more likely goes for search engines that support the use of meta keyword tag). Let’s use the previous example, you realized that people also search for “domain name choosing” information using the phrase “choosing a business domain name”. But, you didn’t mention the word “business” at all. Then, having your meta keyword like <meta name=”keyword” content=”choosing a domain name, business domain name”> or <meta name=”keyword” content=”choosing a business domain name”> will increase the likelihood of your page being found when people looking using the above phrase. Of course, to further increase the chance, you need to also include the words “choosing a business domain name” in your content.
I’d like to remind you that excessively stuffing the meta keyword tag with repeating keywords can drive your site obese and it’ll be difficult to climb the rank stairs. As for the meta tag is not as critical as it used to be, if you’re new to Search Engine Optimization, you don’t have to worry about the meta keyword tags at all.
If you decide to use it anyway, or you’ve done it before, you can have your meta tags checked and get suggestions here.
It is also good to use for MSN search engine especially for new blogs. However it takes longer for MSN search engine to noticed new blogs…Longer than Google…Meta tags help
My Daily Thoughts’s last blog post..Laxurious Vacation In Kauai
The more SE knows our blog’s existence, the better. Usually, SEO-ing for Google also brings along SEO-ing for Yahoo! and MSN.