Article printed from SiteProNews: http://www.sitepronews.com
  HTML version available at: http://www.sitepronews.com/archives.html

The Importance of Meta Tags: Providing the Human Touch 
By Matthew Coers (c) 2006

For the uninitiated, meta-tags are pieces of code within your
website that contain information about each page. These tags are
supposed to tell search engines and users what the page is
about.

If you're a little rusty on your Internet jargon, here's a
primer. There are essentially three types of meta-tags that
concern most marketers:

* Title - This is the text that appears in the title-bar of your
  web browser.

* Description - This is a quick summary of the information on
  the page.

* Keywords - These are words that are important in the page.

Up until about 4 years ago, there was a tremendous focus on
meta-tags as a method of improving search engine rankings.
Webmasters could stuff all sorts of words into the meta-tags to
improve their search engine rankings for the words they wanted
to rank well for.

It wasn't long before the search engines caught on to this
little trick, and as a result the efficacy of "keyword-stuffed"
meta-tags dwindled over time. Posts on Search Engine
Optimization (SEO) boards heralded the demise of the meta-tag
with posters claiming that Google all but ignored the meta-tags.
It seemed that there was no use for meta-tags anymore - at least
from the perspective of the online marketer.

Meta-tag Re-emergence

But then a funny thing happened. The search market started to
fracture. Yahoo and MSN both spun up their own search engines
and dropped Google's results from their engines. Both Yahoo and
MSN's new engines seemed to use content from the Title and
Description meta-tags to display in the SERPs (Search Engine
Results Pages).

These observations appear to be the case even today. By running
a query for the term, "Online Advertising" on MSN, I got some
interesting results (screenshots available at
http://www.profitchoice.com/articles/support/meta_msn.asp)

Now, if you look at the screenshots in the link above, you'll
notice that the clickable link on the search engine matches the
page's title tag verbatim, and the site's description in MSN
starts off with the first sentence of the description tag. Yahoo
operates in a very similar fashion. Many of the results on the
SERPs of both search engines will use the content from the
meta-tags heavily (as long as the pages have meta-tags at all).

Google is less predictable with regard to the use of meta-tags.
Google often uses the title tag to determine the clickable link
on it's results pages, but only occasionally uses the
description tag content in the page summary that it displays.

Remember the Human Beings

Ok, now that I've put you to sleep with technical details and
observations it's time to wake up, because there is a very
important marketing point that I'm working towards here.

The point that I'm driving at is that although the search
engines probably have devalued the SEO value of the meta-tag to
a great extent, that doesn't mean that it isn't important.

When people search for keywords in your industry it isn't enough
to be #1 on the list of results. You still need to convince
those humans to click on your link. The way to do that is to
design the most effective page description that can possibly
appear in the SERPs.

Steps to Take To Improve Your Meta-Tags

As a general rule, Yahoo uses the first 25-30 words of your Meta
Description tag in the site description it displays on your
SERPs; MSN uses the first 15 or so.

Write out a 30-word description of each page of your website
that is broken up into two parts. The first 15 words need to get
across what the page is about - this is all the MSN searchers
will see. The second 15 words should support the first - this
will be visible to Yahoo searchers.

Google searchers will sometimes see the first 7 - 15 words as
well (although you can't count on it). With meta-tags you have
to just focus on the things you can control, and right now
Google is an unknown quantity so it's probably best not to worry
about optimizing for Google.

Don't Drop the Meta-Tags

Several years ago the search engines devalued the use of
meta-tags in determining rankings. But because they use the
meta-tags as page descriptions in their SERP pages, you must
make special efforts to ensure that the content presented to
searchers inspires them to click on your links rather than your
competitors'.

If you don't put meta-tags on your website's pages, then Yahoo
and MSN (with a combined market share of around 45%) will just
guess at what to put in the description of your website. They
will pull phrases out of context (much the way Google does) from
your site and slap them in there. The result is not nearly as
inviting as it could have been otherwise. That's why it is
always beneficial to learn to write effective meta-tags.
================================================================
Matthew Coers has been building and marketing websites for 12
years. His website, ProfitChoice.com (http://www.profitchoice.com)
contains FREE video tutorials and online courses designed to help
entrepreneurs build a website and make money online
(http://www.profitchoice.com/buildwebsite/)
================================================================

Copyright © 2006 Jayde Online, Inc.  All Rights Reserved.

SiteProNews is a registered service mark of Jayde Online, Inc.