Optimize Your Meta Tags

META Tags are HTML tags which provide information that describes the content of the Web page. META tags are hidden in a document's source; they are inserted into the "head" area of your Web pages. Search engines have recognized that Website owners and administrators can use this resource to control their positioning and descriptions in search engine results.

The words placed within this tag are given some weight with most search engines and can help a page to rank high in the search results for these particular words. Many search engines have now incorporated reading META tags as part of their indexing formulas. That's why Meta Tags Optimization is so important for your website to appear within the top ten or twenty placements. There are basically two major META tags that you create and optimize:

<META name="description" content="a well optimized
short description of your page">
<META name="keywords" content="a, list, of, keywords">

The META description tag should not simply restate the title of the page, it should describe the page. Search engines vary in their preferred size for META tags. Try to optimize the smaller number, 150 characters, for your site. Never make your META tag more than 200 characters long because some results pages will cut it off.

A META keyword tag lists all the keywords for which you would like search engines to rank your site. Although not all search engines support this tag, you should use it for the ones that do.

Search engines vary in their size preferences for META keyword tags. MSN, for example, will accept a META keyword tag up to 1024 characters long, while HotBot specifies 75 characters as its guideline. Avoid repeating keywords more than 3-7 times; you can get penalized for that. Up to 3 repetitions are recommended.