SEM DataBase

People say that the use of meta tags are dead, a useless addition to your web site, but are they wrong? Meta tags still serve a useful purpose in every web site. Even though not all search engines utilize these tags they still hold extremely important information about your web site and it’s content.

Not only do meta tags tell a search engine spider about your web site, it also provides instructions telling the spider what you would like it to do and not do.

First let’s look at what meta tags tell us about your web site:

The first tag in your meta tags should be your title tag, in my opinion this is the most important tag you can control. This tag should state your company and no more then 3 key words that pertain to that page. An example of this is

SEO ONE, inc. Search Engine Optimization, Internet Marketing, SEO.

Keyword tag should be the next in line of importance. This tag is fairly straight forward however there are rules on how many keywords you should have. The rule of thumb is around 10 but I recommend no more then 3 keywords. The reason for this is the more keywords you have the more difficult it is to keep the weighted average where it needs to be above 54%. It also becomes difficult to match the keywords in the site to the keyword meta tags. An example of this meta tag is



The 3rd in succession should be your description tag, in this tag we want to describe the web page we are on, and again we have another opportunity to list our 3 key words for this page. This is important do not over look this. It is also critical to keep the order the keywords appear. An example of this tag is



Now we are onto the part of the tags that tell the search engine what you would like for it to do with your web site. These tags are also critical as we can in some cases direct the spider through your web pages.



This tag tells the search engine you would like it to visit your home page, follow all linked pages, and cashes all pages it passes through. This is important because it allows the engine to store your site in it’s data base.



In this tag we tell the spider to come back to our web site every 7 days to search for more content. As a web page changes the content needs to be re indexed in order for it to be relevant. This tag can help us with this point.

There are many more tags, and more detailed information about the tags above, however I only wanted to give a general overview as to the importance of the above tags.

One day I was desperately searching for one topic in Google. I was not not satisfied with the top page results as the content included in the top search result pages were not enough. So I decided to check the results in the less priority pages. I wondered that some web sites were content rich than I expect. So after that I was thinking why these pages came to low priority and the less relevant pages got high rankings. As a working SEO I decide to analyze each pages on the top ranking and the pages with low search ranking even though they are content full. I didn’t care about the external factors which affecting the result ranks. I just analyzed the on-page factors which determines how much search engine friendly the web page is.

The analysis completed with following results.

1. The pages which optimized are enjoying the high search engine position.

2. The pages which are not optimized are in bottom pages.

What optimization the high rank pages did are not heavy works. They are some simple smart works to ensure that search engines would definitely notice the web page. I am going to tell you some simple steps which any web master can follow.

1. Don’t avoid title tags

Title tags are very important as all search engines will crawl this area for getting an idea about the web page. If the title tag is not relevant to the content of the web page you will not get quality traffic. There is a chance of high bounce rate also present. If a web page has higher bounce rate that the normal rate major search engines will think like you are not providing quality content and that may lead to penalty. So always create relevant title tag with relevant keywords.

2. Don’t waste your time for meta tags

Once upon a time meta tag was very important. All major search engines give attention to the meta tag contents provided in the header. But later many web masters misused the meta tag as they found it is the area they can stuff high traffic keywords to drive traffic. Later Google decides to neglect meta tag as meta tag key words are not relevant to the actual page content. But my advice is not totally neglect meta tag as some search engines still using meta tag. So use a few key words in meta tag and avoid meta tag stuffing.

3. Alt text for images

If your web page is full of images we need to make sure that they have an alt text. In image rich web page search engine will find it difficult to determine what this site is going to tell. Because search engine spiders cannot read images. One more issue is some people still using text only browsers and they cannot see the images. To overcome this limitation we need to add some alt text for images. The alt text should be neat and keyword rich.

4. Ensure that the page contains enough keywords

I stress this part as an important way to get noticed by search engines. If you are creating a content full web page normally there should be enough keywords. But instead of keyword many authors are using short form of keywords to avoid the typing. For a user it is OK as he knows the short form means the keyword but search engine spiders cannot. So use some smart work along with your hard work.

There are many on-page factors which I don’t cover but I ensure you that if you concentrate the points I listed above, that will boost your search engine ranking.