Question 6. What do you mean by Metatags ?
Answer : Meta tags are little lines of code that are placed between
the <HEAD> and the </HEAD> tags in your site's HTML code. They are designed to
give search engines instructions on what your page is about and how they should treat it.
These tags are not displayed to humans visiting your site, but they can be used to
influence the way your site appears in the search results. There are several meta tags that you can add to your pages, but in my
opinion the only useful ones are the keywords tag, the description tag and
the robots tag. Most others, like the author or distribution tags are not used by
the search engines, and I don't recommend using them - you don't want to clutter the top
part of your page with useless things, as it can have a negative impact on your ranking.
Let's take a look at the most important meta tags:
Meta tags: The description tag
<META name="description" content="A
search engine shows the content of this tag below the title of your site when it appears
in the results.">
This tag is very important, since you can use it to
encourage people to click on your listing when you are found in a search engine. When your
page comes up in the search results, the contents of your META description tag are
displayed right below the title of your page. If no description tag is found, the search
engine attempts to create a description for you and often fails to describe your page
properly.
It's worthwhile to pay some attention to fine-tuning the
META description tags you use on your pages. The main reason why you should do so is that
the two things that determine whether you'll get people to click on your listing or not
are this tag and the title of your page. If you're going to work hard enough to grab a
position in the first page of results, you wouldn't want visitors not clicking on your
listing just because it looks uninteresting, now would you?
Make your description meta tags short but informative - if
you can trim them to less than 13 words and you feel that they can still give enough
information to make the user visit your site, you've done well. If your description tag is
over 13 words, try to think how you could reduce the amount of words and still say what
you want to say.
Why should your description meta tags be so short? Well,
usually the search engine only displays a small part of it in the results list, and if the
tag contains too many words, the "extra" words are cut off. So a description
like:
"Rajiv's homepage! If you visit my site, you'll find a
huge amount of information about my favorite food, Veg Pizzas!"
Can look like:
"Rajiv's homepage! If you visit my site, you'll find a
huge amount..."
If the user is looking for information about Veg Pizzas, he
probably won't visit Rajiv's site even if it has a high ranking on the result list,
because the user doesn't see that it's contains a huge amount of information about Veg
Pizzas. For this reason, try to place the relevant stuff near the beginning of the
description and the blabber to the end (or just cut the latter right off). If Rajiv used
"Information on Veg Pizzas, my favorite food. If
you'll visit my site, called 'Rajivs homepage', you'll find a huge amount of interesting
stuff related to them."
as his description, he'd be better off than in the first
example. He'd still have a description that is too long, but if the search engine decided
to cut it, people would still see it as relevant to Veg Pizzas from the first four words
and visit. It would be even better if Rajiv could just lose the uninteresting stuff after
the first sentence, since this would raise the weight of the phrase 'Veg Pizzas' in his
tag, earning a (very small) boost in his ranking from the search engine.
Notice that of the major search engines, Google (supplies
secondary results to Yahoo's search) doesn't support the description tag.
Meta tags: The keywords tag
OK, now you've learned what the META description is about
and how you can use it to your advantage. Let's move on to the next tag on our list, the
keywords tag. This is what it looks like:
<META name="keywords" content="Veg Pizzas
information recipes">
The keywords tag contains words and phrases the creator of
the page considers to be relevant to the document. These words can be separated by commas,
spaces or both - the method of separation makes little difference. This tag is not shown
to the people arriving to your site, nor do the search engines display it in their
results, but many search engines do read the keywords tag and give a slight boost to the
page's ranking for the words that are mentioned in it.
Generally, you should only include words and phrases that
are mentioned on your page and you shouldn't use any word more than three times in your
keywords tag. The optimal size for this tag is around 10 words or less, as you do not want
to dilute your important keywords and phrases with obscure words. All of the words you put
in your keywords tag should be relevant to the document; don't add "mp3" to your
keywords if your article about endangered wolves just happens to mention that you listened
to a mp3 while creating the page.
Previously, in the stone age of search engines (1998 or
so), the keywords tag was a very important part of a successful search engine optimization
effort. Nowadays, its effect has been reduced by the appearance more sophisticated search
engine algorithms. I'd still use this tag on my pages, but I wouldn't fuss too much about
it - a good META keywords tag can give you a small boost in many engines, but its weight
is minimal compared to other page elements.
As you have seen from the above, creating the META keywords
and the META description tag is relatively easy.
Meta tags: The robots tag
The third tag we will cover is the META robots tag. It,
just like the keywords tag, is never shown to the human visitors. The META robots tag is a
simple instruction to any search engine spiders on how to treat the page. It looks like
this:
<META name="robots"
content="parameters">
The word 'parameters' should be replaced with commands to
the spider. The available commands are INDEX and FOLLOW, and their negative counterparts,
NOINDEX and NOFOLLOW. The INDEX statement instructs the spider to add the page to the
search engine's index and the FOLLOW statement encourages the spider to follow any links
it finds on the page. As you might have guessed, the NOINDEX tells the spider not to add
the page to the index and the NOFOLLOW instructs the spider not to follow any links on the
page.
Although most spiders automatically assume that any pages
they come across can be indexed and links from them can be followed, it might be a good
idea to add a robots tag with the index and follow statements just in case:
<META name="robots" content="index,
follow">
However, like the META keywords tag, this is nothing to get
all worked up about - you'll usually do fine without a robots tag, it's just a safety
measure. As you have noticed from the above, the robots tag can also be used to prevent
the indexing of a page. However, when doing so, remember that not all spiders support the
META robots tag; you should also add a robots.txt file that forbids the spider to index
the page to be on the safe side.
How
will we analyze your website and the steps which will be taken by us. |
- We will ask you to provide us with 5 different
keywords/phrases with which you wish to get listed in different search engines.
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- We will than look for the sites which occupy
position 1 to 10 in different search engines as per the keywords suggested by you.
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- We will make a detailed study of the statistics if
already existing with you for the website in question so that we can concentrate more on
those keywords by virtue of which you are found by different people.
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- Here is a DEMO of analysis made by us for a sample
site http://delhi-tourism.com .
We will make a similar analysis of your
website and give you a report in PDF format of analysis
for 5 search engines namely 'Google.com','Altavista.com','Alltheweb.com','MSN'
and 'Lycos'.
(You can also specify any 5 search
engines of your choice.)
We will document how your website is listed in 5 of the above mentioned search
engines and
its ranking in comparison to 10 other websites related to your industry and Finally
checking
why these other websites are listed/ranked on number 1 to 10.
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