An Introduction to Meta Tags: Part I
Meta tags are generally keywords or descriptions that you can manually input into the <head> area of your website. There are three types of meta tags, title tags, description tags, and keyword tags. The great thing about keyword and description tags is that they are invisible to the viewer, unlike the title tag, which many of us are already familiar with. The main difference between the title tag and the keyword and description tags is that the keyword and description tags contain descriptive words, phrases or pieces of information that your human visitors do not need to see and be bothered with.
While meta tags have never been a guaranteed way to get your website ranking better in search engines, it has been proven to be one of the most effective ways to get crawlers to index you for keywords you could have only dreamed of being indexed for in a high up position. Meta tags allow you to easily communicate with search engine crawlers by describing what your blog is all about.
When placing keyword tags into your website’s coding, don’t go nuts with the keywords. It’s a commonly believed myth that the more keywords you have under your keyword tags, the better. If you have too many keyword tags, search engine crawlers will simply get overwhelmed, and potentially ignore many of your more targeted keywords.
Now that you understand that you’ll need to be limited in the number of keyword tags that you use, I want to remind you of a saying you probably have heard at some point between your high school career and where you are now, keep it simple stupid (commonly referred to as K.I.S.S.). Don’t use long, descriptive, big words when describing your website with your keyword tags. Just use basic one-word or two-word describing words or nouns that you think somebody might search for in a search engine and would be targeted towards your website.
I’ll be taking you deeper into the DNUnderground coding and showing you how to create these meta tags in Part II of this article tomorrow, but for now, I want to use my keyword tags as an example. Some of my keywords include, “domain”, “domain name”, “domainer”, “domain blog”, and “marketing”. My recommendation is to limit yourself to about 40 words (maximum), and pick general phrases as I did. But make sure your general phrases are really well-targeted towards your blog. I know if someone types in a phrase like “domain blog”, the content on my website will please them. In other words, don’t stretch your horizons too far when coming up with these keywords.
Part II of this article will be written and published tomorrow, so make sure to check back. It will show you how to actually implement meta tags into your website coding and will go more in depth in regards to the difference between the title, description, and keyword meta tags. For now, feel free to comment with any questions.