Resources

What are meta-tags and keywords?

When spider-bots scour through your website, they assess it in a variety of ways. A spider-bot is a computer program that follows certain links on the web and gathers information as it goes. They classify details about your website for their respective search engines. They look at content and analyze it and determine what type of visitors your meta tags and keywords are trying to attract.

A meta tag is a line of HTML code that contains metadata (or description) about a website. It doesn't have any effect of how the page looks and is not seen by viewers who visit the website (unless they look at the source code). It adds a description within the search results.

For example, perform a Google search for electric guitars. Notice how electric guitars appears in the title? Next, take a look at the short description that follows. This is the meta tag. Experts agree that 15 words is the optimum length. So, your first assignment is to write out a 15 word meta tag for your website.

Keywords are defined as the words or exact phrases used by prospects when searching. You want to identify the phrases being used to search for your products or services and then incorporate those in to your website copy.

Think through specific search possibilities for your keywords rather than broad general categories. Be sure to include your keywords and phrases as text in the body of your page more than once, but do not over do it! If your page is riddled with excessive use of these words or phrases, you will very likely be penalized with lower rankings. Stay away from hidden keywords.