Meta Tags
Meta tags are one of the most important aspects of site design. If your site is not promoted properly, no one will see you site, and all of the hard work you put into it will be for nothing. When a site engine lists your site, it reads your meta tags and they tell it what your site is about and where to list it. If your meta tags are done right, the search engine should put your site exactly where your desired visitors will look for it. Do a sloppy job, and you could be listed in the wrong category, or come up on the 100th page of results for an important set of keywords in a search.
Here's where I started learning, this is a very detailed and easy to understand meta tag tutorial that is a must-read: Preparing Your Pages for the Search Engines. The tutorial here is a crash course, if you really want to know what you're doing read this article.
Here's how I do it:
1. Open a new Word document (or other word processing program). Make a list of your base keyphrases. These should be phrases that will apply to just about every page on your site. For NetCastles, I started with phrases like:
web site design
web site
webpage
web designer
Make sure you cover plurals and commom mispellings of all of your keywords. You need to know which words get more hits. For example, if I enter "web site" I get 111,423 hits, if I enter "web page" I get 63,035 hits. Therefore I should get more visitors if I use the phrase web page instead of web site in my meta tags and site content.
Start out with your phrases in alphabetical order. Go to the Overture Search Suggestions Page and enter your first keyphrase. You will get a table that lists similar phrases or keywords, in order of the number of hits each got in the past month.
Select the applicable phrases and Hit Ctrl+C to copy them, then open a new text (Notepad) document and hit Ctl+V to paste them. Then delete and phrases that don't fit. You may find that one of your results gets more hits than the phrase you entered, but is just as relevant to your site. Your hard work in researching meta tags has already showed a benefit. Once you have cleaned out the unnecessary keywords, copy and paste the new list to your Word document.
2. Continue to research your keyphrases until you have all of them, then start to copy the highest ones and paste them onto the end of your document, so that you end up with a list of phrases in order of hits (you won't need more than 500 characters after your take out the numbers and spaces, stop when you think you have enough). Take out the number of hits once you have them in order and separate them with commas, no spaces. Like this: site design,web site,webpage.
3. Now you are ready to make you home page meta tags. There are three tags you must have: the title, description, and keywords tags.
They look like this:
<TITLE>My page title here</TITLE>
15-20 words
<META name="description" content="description texthere">
100-200 chars
<META name="keywords" content="keywords,go,here">
200-500 chars
Use your highest rated keyphrases for your home page tags. The title tag is what is displayed in the top bar of the browser screen when people look at your page, the description is what the search engines use for describing your page, and the keywords are what the search engines use to place your page in their listings. You can use the Word Count Tool in Word to make sure your tags aren't too long.
4. Once you have you home page tags done, copy them from the Word document to the source of your web page, just under the <HEAD> tag. Then you can start on the meta tags for your other pages. Make these tags as specific as possible; the wider the range of your meta tags the wider the range of your visitors.