February 8, 2011

There are plenty of different ways to help the big search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing to find your site, but one of the most simple ways to being your on-site search engine optimization is to add a few select meta tags between the tags on your website. Some search experts may tell you that this makes no difference whatsoever, however I think when used correctly meta tags can still be very beneficial. The key to meta tags is not to cram them with too many of the same keywords and not to use too many of them. Another key is to change certain tags (title, description) for every page on your site. Below you’ll find a list of the meta tags I always use when doing seo for my web designs.

title – Probably the most simple of all the tags. Most people get taught how to use these tags on day one of web design class. I usually choose three our four keywords, making sure not to go over a character limit of 60 (with spaces) and separate them by “-” or “|”.

meta name=”description” content=”” – Here you’ll want to describe your site and paragraph form. Usually the search engines grab this and use it as the description you see under the links in search results. Sprinkle in two or three of your keywords as best as you can, but don’t over do it. Also, don’t go over a character limit of 160 characters.

meta name=”keywords” content=”” – This is one of the tags that I don’t think matters as much as it used to, however I still add it to all my sites. Pick ten to twelve keyterms and list them separated by commas.

meta name=”robots” content=”index,follow” – Set this exactly as you see it here. This is used to tell the search engine spiders to follow and index your site.

Those are the four I make sure to use on every design I do. That’s not to say those are the only four out there. Those are just the four I make sure I use every time. Use these four meta tags on all your websites pages and you’ll be sure to see at least a slight increase in traffic from search engines.