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Meta Tag Guidelines
META Tags are HTML tags which provide information that describes the content of the webpages a user will be viewing. Search engines have recognized that website owners and administrators can use this resource to control their positioning and descriptions in search engine results. Many search engines have now incorporated reading META tags as part of their indexing formulas.
Metatags include the page title, a short description of the page, keywords that are relevant to the page, the author and lots more. They are not the secret weapon to engine ranking that many people assume, just an element which needs to be included.
The HTML document consists of a header section and a body section. The Header generally contains information which is used by search engines, spiders and so on. This is where the metatags go, in between the <HEAD> and the </HEAD> sections. The body section contains the coding for the text and images presented to the viewer.
To achieve a high position it is best to concentrate on a small number of words and include them in the title, description and keyword metatags as well as at the start of your web page. As more keywords are added, the relevance of each is diluted resulting in a lower score by the search engine algorithm.
To achieve a high position it is best to concentrate on a small number of words and include them in the title, description and keyword metatags as well as at the start of your web page. As more keywords are added, the relevance of each is diluted resulting in a lower score by the search engine algorithm.
Some search engines ignore the metatags altogether and concentrate on what the viewer sees in their web browser. Include your keywords in the top line of text on the page. Each engine is different and it is necessary to experiment with each to achieve an overall high position. However achieving top spot by optimising for one engine will not necessarily mean that the same page hits top spot in another.
We recommend that you at least include the 'Description', 'Keyword' and 'Robots' tags. Also the 'Title' of your page plays an important role in helping search engines (and visitors) to determine the content of your site.Only 25% of sites use them, but most search engines evaluate META tags when they rank your site.
Once you have selected the keywords that really fit your site you can begin to add them to your page as you build it. Along with using those key words as the first words within their HTML meta tags, image tags, heading tags, title tag, text link tags, alt tags and even the file name of the page itself you need to use them in your HTML meta tags
The most common Metatags are listed here.
Avoid the temptation to stuff too many words in here and avoid repeating your keywords as this may be considered spamming by some engines resulting in your site being blacklisted, penalised or banned.
Find out more about spamming here.
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