Free Search Engine Optimization Tips

Ahhh…to META or not to META that is the question? Or in the words of my friend from Italy, “Whats the META you?”

Ok, enough of the puns. Really, META tags are not what they used to be. Now that doesn’t mean that they are not important, but it means they don’t carry as much weight with the search engines as they used to. Again, on our scale of +3 to -3, META tags come in at a +1. So, a point is a point and in the search engine optimization game, it all adds up. Three out of four tags that that I review here all carry a +1, the last one (the dreaded <Refresh> tag) gets a -1.

Let take a look then at some of the META tags and what you can and can not do to optimize your web site. First one up, the <Description> tag. Use this tag to write a description of your site. Now even though Google really doesn’t factor in META tags anymore, MSN and Yahoo still use META tags extensively. The other advantage to the <Description> tag is that some search engines will use that content as a description of your site in the search results that are displayed to the end user. The other rule that you want to be aware of is to try and keep your description to a 150 characters or less. Two reasons for that: first, if your description has to many characters it will not be considered a “robot friendly” web page. The other reason is that anything over that 150 character limit may get truncated by the search engine and in that case it would not display in the search results.

One last point, you also would want to try and strategically pepper your description with your main keywords as well. Just remember to write your description for humans and not just for the search engines.

Next post - The <Keywords> META tag.