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The Essentials About Meta Tags and SEO

SEO, also known as search engine optimization, is one of the key steps in creating, maintaining, and promoting a high-traffic website. Freeing you from spending thousands of dollars on advertising and promotion, SEO allows you to grow your traffic organically with the help of page rankings. What many web designers learn only after much experience, however, is the difference meta tags make in how your pages rank.

No aspect of SEO is more commonly overlooked than placing meta tags on every page. These tags, written into the code of your page where they are invisible to visitors, give search engines specific identifiers for the page. Some websites create their listings almost entirely on meta tags, yet many website owners fail to implement them to full effect.

There are different kinds of meta tags that impact SEO. Take, for instance, the META KEYWORDS tag. This meta tag provides a list of keywords to spiders, telling them what the website is all about. If you visit NYTimes.com and right click on the page, and then click on “View Page Source,” you will find a meta tag about half down the first page reading META KEYWORDS. This tag will show you a long list of keywords starting with “New York Times, international news, daily newspaper, national news?” and so on. The keyword list contains dozens of words that relate to this particular paper but also to papers in general.

Most search engines also detect these keywords in page content, but it is helpful to include in a tag keywords that are especially low-density in text, such as unusual spellings of names and places, related topics not specifically mentioned on the page, and any other keywords it is difficult to inject into the text in a user-friendly way.

Another important tag is the META DESCRIPTION tag. This tag is used by the engines to present information about your website when it appears in search results. Most engines allow 160 characters here, and this is a place you can include keywords to boost your page rankings for targeted phrases.

There are also other meta tags, but these two are vital for SEO. It is important that you maximize your use of META KEYWORDS and META DESCRIPTION tags by making sure you do not cram them with words unrelated to your content or use the same keywords too many total times on the same page. Putting in too many keywords will cause the search engines to penalize your pages as spam. Not using enough keywords is almost as bad.

Finally, always different meta tags for every page. Changing the meta tags throughout your site makes it possible for the search engines to detect valuable differences in keywords on particular pages.

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