Every smart marketer is looking for the holy grail of how to drive more free traffic to their site. Meta tags can help.
Meta tags are information inserted into the “head” area of your web pages. Other than the title tag (explained below), information in the head area of your web pages is not seen by those viewing your pages in browsers.
Instead, meta information in this area is used to communicate information that a human visitor may not be concerned with. Meta tags, for example, can tell a browser what “character set” to use, what style sheet, or whether a web page has self-rated itself in terms of adult content.
It is worthwhile to use the meta description tag for your pages, because it gives you some degree of control with various crawlers. An easy way to do this often is to take the first sentence or two of body copy from your web page and use that for the meta description content.The Meta Keywords Tag
The meta keywords tag allows you to provide additional text for crawler-based search engines to index along with your body copy.
The meta keywords tag is sometimes useful as a way to reinforce the terms you think a page is important for. For instance, if you had a page about nutrition– AND you say the word nutrition at various places in your body copy — then mentioning the words “nurition” in the meta keywords tag MIGHT help boost your page a bit higher for those words.
Remember, if you don’t use the words “nutrition” on the page at all, then just adding it to the meta keywords tag is extremely unlikely to help the page do well for the term. so no keywrod stuffing, please!
The meta keyword tag is also sometimes useful as a way to help your page come up for synonyms or unusual words that don’t appear on the page itself. For instance, let’s say you had a page all about the “detox diet”. You never actually say the word “detox diet” on this page. By having the word in your meta keywords tag, then you may help increase the odds of coming up if someone searched for “how can I start a detox diet.” Of course you would greater increase the odds if you just used the word “detox diet” in the body copy of the page itself.
Far too many people new to search engine optimization obsess with the meta keywords tag. FEW crawlers support it. For those that do, it MIGHT! MAYBE! PERHAPS! POSSIBLY! BUT WITH NO GUARANTEE! help improve the ranking of your page. It also may very well do nothing for your page at all. In fact, repeat a particular word too often in a meta keywords tag and you could actually harm your page’s chances of ranking well because they will think you are stuffing the metatag. Because of this, I strongly suggest that those new to search engine optimization not focus totally on the metatags.
Even those who are experienced in search engine optimization think is no longer worth using the tags. Speaking from personal experience, I would say that it does help, and if at all possible, I would rather have the chance to write my own marketing copy for my site than leave it to to the search engine spiders.
When it comes to meta tags, think main keywords related to your niche. Be sure they match the content on the page itself. Then see what a difference meta tags can make to your level of traffic.
