Search Engine Ranking and Meta Tags Explained

Website Design and Search Engine Promotion Services

Search Ranking and Meta Tags

Search engines read Meta Tags and factor them within their ranking algorithms when deciding which category your web site should be placed in, and how it should be ranked or positioned against other sites within that category. How much relevance is given to Meta tags is another thing all together. Each search engine has a different ranking algorithm that uses Meta information in a different way. We've looked at the Meta Keywords tag and explained how this has diminishing significance in the scheme of things, however the Title and Description tags are still important.

Also, the order in which you present Meta tags to search engines appears to have some significance. The correctly formatted opening HTML on any page of your site should look like this:

<html><head>

<title>Web positioning and ranking in the Internet Search Engines</title>

<meta name="description" content="Achieving high rankings and search engine positions is important for generating traffic to your web site, learn how to optimize your web site for high search engine ranking">

<meta name="keywords" content="search engine positioning,ranking,search engine optimization,listing,placements,service,web site,rank,search,find,traffic,top engines,Altavista,Google,Yahoo,hitmine.com"><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">

<META NAME="revisit-after" content="14 days">

<META NAME="robots" content="index,follow">

<META NAME="distribution" content="global">

</head>

Note that the opening HTML section containing the Meta Tags must end with a closing <head> tag. You may also add comment tags within the <head></head> section or add them anywhere within the page HTML provided they are correctly formatted for reading by the search engines:

 Note that the text here does not have to be grammatically correct, it is not visible by the viewer. Add your important search phrases and keywords but do not over do it. Make sure that you close the tag properly!

Title Tag - come up with an enticing title for your page, remember this is what many search engines display when they return your site in the search results. People will read your Title tag and decide whether to click on the site or not. Tell them exactly what your page is about - "search engine ranking and positioning" for example. This tag is also used by most search engines in establishing the theme and content of the page, so it is important to get your keywords in this tag. 7 to 9 words max for this tag, around 5 is better.

Description Tag - Like the Title tag some search engines display this in their search results, so structure a description that entices people to click on your link. This is also considered by some engines in the page ranking algorithm, so include your keywords. Around 800 characters is permissible.

Keywords tag - here

Robot Instruction Tags - <META NAME="robots" content="index,follow"> This tag is a simple instruction to the search engine spider how to handle the page. 'index/follow' will instruct the search engine spider to index the page content and follow links into other pages /sites. noindex/nofollow will instruct them not to index the page content and not to follow any links. The other two variations are now self explanatory index/nofollow and noindex/follow. This tag can be used to block out search engines form spidering pages that are not related to the main theme of your site see notes on theme based ranking. It can also be used to block access to pages that contain too many keyword repetitions etc. The other robot instruction tag relates to how often the search engines should revisit the page to update there index to reflect revised content. For example if you frequently update that particular page, say every 14 days, then set the tag thus: <META NAME="revisit-after" content="14 days">

Try to follow the guidelines above and observe the order in which tags are listed on the page. You will find that some engines do not display your Title and Description tag contents in their search listings, rather they look for the first few lines of descriptive text on the page, and display that instead. This is important as they will also be the first words encountered on the page and used toward establishing the theme of your site and establishing keyword prominence. Tables can confuse this issue so be careful with how you arrange your tables and how you position your navigation buttons on the page. You want the path to your descriptive text to be as unimpeded as possible.

Keyword selection Theme based ranking General tips

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