Popular Meta Tags and how to use Meta data in your web pages.

There is a lot of misinformation on meta tags, their usage, and exactly what effect if any they have on the traffic of your web site all over the Internet.

We are not experts, and will never claim to be. What we have learned has worked for this web site and hundreds of others our company has been involved in over the years. Realistically meta tags do indeed work, but there is more to their creation and usage than thinking up a bunch of keywords that you want your web site to be found for by others and embedding them into your web pages. We hope we can enlighten you to some of the ways to use meta data in your web pages and help you in getting traffic for your site.

The first problem with using meta tags is that a lot of people do not know that there must be a relevance between the keywords you are using and the content of the page you are using those keywords on. They must be in the body of the page you are working on several times for them to be effective. Your targeted words must also be in your page title and in your page description.

You need to think of what words people would use to search for your site, and create web pages using those words in the body, in the title, in the description.

You need to use keywords that are relevant to what your site is about, take your time in the selection of these words, sit down away from your HTML editor, or whatever you use to create web pages, and start writing your content for your web pages, use a good text editor, the reason for using a text editor is that text editors can make it easier to copy and paste the text into you HTML documents with out adding unnecessary characters that you will have to clean up later. Make sure your keywords are used throughout the text (this is where it gets hard) and make sure the text makes sense to you, and hopefully to the other people that will read it. Use a thesaurus if needed. (a good text editor is NoteTab (http://www.notetab.com/) the freeware version has many features that will help in creating your meta tags, HTML, ASP and other documents.)

The greatest misconception!
A lot of people think that by just adding the keywords tag and placing the keywords in their pages they would likely be found by just having the keyword meta tag and it will give them unlimited traffic, this is not always true! That meta tags are the web site cure all for traffic woes, also not true.

Your keywords have to have a direct reflection on the content contained in the body of your web page that is the very first priority, its also very helpful to have your targeted words in your title, and in your page description. One other thing. There must be 999 gazillion words on web pages throughout the World Wide Web, with that many words in documents indexed in search engines and directories, single keywords may not help you at all, that is why 2 and 3 word phrases should be used. When people use search engines they usually use multiple words phrases. There is also a practice of using common spelling mistakes of keywords also, we have never used that style so we cannot tell you how effective it is.

Most search engine bots only spider so many characters of a page, the average is 1000, some engines read the whole page, others just the title, and some the end of the page. Some engines do not even use meta data values. Directories do not even spider your pages but never let any of this get you down. Content is usually the way to go with getting traffic, and right now it works, in few months all of this may change.

This is just the beginning there are more ups and downs for your web site ahead, anyone with a popular web site and not paying thousands of dollars has had to work hard at it, you will have to work hard at it. We have had to deal with search engines changing the way they rank web pages. We have had to redo our web pages, re submit them, re write them, and we do it every chance we get because without traffic your web site will have a very small life expectancy, but if you want the traffic you will work at it.

When your site is taken down in rank, that is hard, especially if you had a good listing, it will happen, it has happened to all of us at one time or another.

But, you must not give up if you want the traffic.
You start over, you re-optimize your pages and resubmit them, and keep checking to see if you got listed, what rank is it at for your search term. Over and over its never ending if you want your site to stay popular.

You know, sometimes maybe it would be better to pay for the traffic.

The Meta Tag Elements

TITLE
Is placed at the top of your <head> </head> tags in your HTML document. Note: FrontPage users - when FP saves a document it places the title where it wants to in the document. The middle or the bottom of the head tags, remember to manually move the title of your web page to the uppermost top. And never use more than 80 characters in your title.

PICS
The next is called the PICS tag or label - it is not a necessity but it does help in showing spiders and web browsers your child safe rating for your site. You get your coding from safe surf or R.S.A.C. one tag for each rating resource. More information can be attained here http://www.w3.org/pics.

GENERATOR
This tag tells what web publishing tool (program) you used to create the web page it is not a necessary tag element so you do not have to use it, but, most web creation programs will use it for you anyway.

S-Bots
This meta tag should be used always, as it instructs the robot (spider) what to do with your pages.

DISTRIBUTION
This meta tag designates the scope of distribution of your document. This can be used for content control. Web servers will not service a Local document to web visitors.

COPYRIGHT
This meta tag clearly states in a manner acceptable by prevailing laws, who owns the copyright of the document text, or design.

AUTHOR
The author meta tag, the author of the web site.

LANGUAGE
This meta tag identifies the language of the context. You can edit the tags into any valid language and country code.

Rating
This meta tag is a simple site rating scheme. Made almost obsolete by PICS.

CLASSIFICATION
This meta tag defines the site classification. This tag can and will be used to buy some search engines to place your site in an appropriate category.

DOCUMENT EXPIRES
This meta tag can be used by caches to determine when to fetch a fresh copy of the associated document.

REPLY TO
This meta tag is used to identify to whom the visitor should send comments or replies.

*This tag is not being used as much due to e-mail harvestors that spider web sites to gather up e-mail addresses for sending unsolicited e-mail.

REVISIT
This meta tag is used to inform the search bot/web crawler when it should revisit your web document to update its index. Recommended NO LESS THAN 30 DAYS and NO MORE than 1 year.

PRAGMA
This meta tag is used to inform the browser that it should retrieve a new copy of the document versus using a cached version.

KEYWORDS META TAG
This meta tag informs the search bot/web crawler what the main points are of the document it is reviewing. Never repeat your keywords more that 6 times as a rule. No more than 1000 characters in your keywords tag.

Description Meta Tag
This meta tag informs the search bot/web crawler or visitor via a brief synopsis what your site is all about. Not more than 200 characters should be used.

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