The Importance of Meta-tags: Providing the Human Touch

The Importance of Meta-tags: Providing the Human Touch

To the uninitiated, meta-tags are pieces of code within your site that contain information about each page. These tags are supposed to explain to lookup engines and users what the page is about.

If you`re a little rusty on your Internet jargon, here`s a primer. There are actually essentially three types of meta-tags that concern most marketers:

· Title - That is the text that appears in the title-bar of one`s net browser

· Description - This is certainly a quick summary of your information over the page

· Keywords - These are words that are important during the short article

Up until about 4 years ago, there was a tremendous focus on meta-tags for a method of improving lookup engine rankings. Webmasters could stuff all sorts of words in the meta-tags to enhance their lookup engine rankings to the words they wanted to rank very well for.

It wasn`t prolonged ahead of the research engines caught on to this little trick, and like a result the efficacy of "keyword-stuffed" meta-tags dwindled around time. Posts on Lookup Engine Optimization (SEO) boards heralded the demise of the meta-tag with posters claiming that Google all but ignored the meta-tags. It seemed that there was no use for meta-tags anymore - at least within the perspective on the online marketer.

Meta-tag Re-emergence

But then a funny point happened. The research market place begun to fracture. Yahoo and MSN both spun up their individual search engines and dropped Google`s results from their engines. Both Yahoo and MSN`s new engines seemed to utilize content through the Title and Description meta-tags to display during the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

These observations seem to generally be the case even today. By running a query for that term, "Online Advertising" on MSN, I acquired some interesting results (screenshots available at (http://www.profitchoice.com/articles/support/meta_msn.asp))

Now, in case you look at the screenshots from the hyperlink above, you will notice which the clickable link to the research engine matches the page`s title tag verbatim, along with the site`s description in MSN starts off together with the first sentence with the description tag. Yahoo operates inside a very similar fashion. A lot of on the results within the SERPs of both research engines will use the content in the meta-tags heavily (providing the pages have meta-tags at all).

Google is less predictable with regard to your use of meta-tags. Google usually uses the title tag to determine the clickable link on it really is results pages, but only occasionally uses the description tag content while in the page summary that it displays.

Remember the Human Beings

Ok, now that I`ve put you to sleep with technical details and observations it can be time for you to wake up, because there is usually a very important marketing point that I am working towards the following.

The point that I am driving at is that although the search engines probably have devalued the SEO value in the meta-tag to a great extent, that doesn`t mean that it isn`t important.

When folks research for keywords inside your industry it isn`t enough to be #1 to the list of results. You still have to convince those humans to click on on your own hyperlink. The strategy to do this is to design the most effective page description that could possibly appear in the SERPs.

Steps to Consider To further improve Your Meta-Tags

Being a general rule, Yahoo uses the first 25-30 words of the Meta Description tag while in the web-site description it displays on your SERPs; MSN uses the first 15 or so.

Produce out a 30-word description of each page of your respective website that is broken up into two parts. The first 15 words ought to get across what the web page is about - this can be all the MSN searchers will see. The second 15 words must support the first - it will be visible to Yahoo searchers.

Google searchers will sometimes see the first seven - 15 words too (although you can`t count on it). With meta-tags you must just focus within the factors you may control, and at the moment Google is an unknown quantity so it is probably very best not to be worried about optimizing for Google.

Do not Drop the Meta-Tags

Quite a few years ago the research engines devalued the use of meta-tags in determining rankings. But because they use the meta-tags as web page descriptions in their SERP pages, you will need to make special efforts to make sure that the content presented to searchers inspires them to click on with your one-way links rather than your competitors`.

Should you will not put meta-tags on your own website`s pages, then Yahoo and MSN (with a combined marketplace share of around 45%) will just guess at what to put inside the description of the site. They may pull phrases out of context (much the way Google does) from your site and slap them in there. The result isn`t nearly as inviting as it could have been otherwise. That`s why it is generally beneficial to discover to create effective meta-tags.

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