A lot of people tend to overlook the small things that will increase your ranking within search engines, but the easiest solution has to be adding meta tags.

What are meta tags? Well, ‘meta tags’ are information inserted into the ‘head’ area of your web page. The information that you insert within the ‘meta tags’ are not seen by those viewing your site in a browser, but rather, for search engine crawlers. For example, meta tags can communicate to browsers on what character set to use or whether a site has self-rated itself in terms of adult content.

There are two main parts of meta tags that will help with your search engine rankings – the description and keywords. Though, the title isn’t officially a ‘meta tag’ I will discuss how to helps as well. In all three (including the title), you want to relate it to your overall content within your site or it may actually hurt you.

For example, if your site is primarily about cooking, you want to be as descriptive as you can. You probably don’t want to add words like “having fun, clean up, shopping,” but rather “cooking, baking, foods.”

Meta tags are inserted between the opening and closing of the HEAD tag. The title is usually inserted right below the HEAD tag, followed by the META DESCRIPTION tag then the META KEYWORDS tag. Please see image below:

The Title Tag

The HTML title tag isn’t exactly a meta tag but the importance is just as great as the meta description and meta keywords. I already discussed this topic in Put Keywords in Blog Title to Help with SEO, but I’ll reiterate.

Your important keywords should be included within your title. The title is displayed in the reverse bar in your browser and that’s usually what shows up within search engines.

As you can see in my example, I put “Tips for Blogging at ‘Dat’ Money.com” and that’s what would show up as the title link in search engines, the browser title, as well as what would show up if you added DatMoney.com to your bookmarks/favorites.

See the image below for the example on how to add this code:

The Meta Description Tag

The ‘Meta Description’ tag allows you to influence the description of your page/entire site in the crawlers that support the tag. The text you enter will generally show up as the description within a search engine. Though, not every search engine will pick this up; Google is a good example, they ignore the ‘meta description’ tag.

The text that you put within the meta description should be no more than 200 to 250 characters. Please see the image below for the HTML code:

The Meta Keywords Tag

The ‘meta keywords’ tag allows you to provide additional text for crawler-based search engines to help reinforce your keywords within your site. There are various ways this can help; here are some examples.

Let’s say you have a site about playing Xbox 360 – AND you include the words ‘Xbox 360’ within your content – then mentioning ‘Xbox 360’ in the meta keywords may help boost your search engine results a little just y inserting those words into the meta keywords tag.

But keep in mind that if you never use the words ‘Xbox 360’ on your page at all, it is very unlikely that it will help the page based on that term. The crawlers that support this usually works in conjunction for the text in the body AND from the meta keywords tag.

The meta keywords tag is also useful as a way to help your site come up with synonyms or words that don’t generally appear within the body text. Let’s go back to the ‘Xbox 360’ example. Say you have a page on the Xbox game ‘Halo 3’ but within that page you never mention ‘Xbox 360’, by having the word in your meta keywords tag it will increase the odds of showing up in search engine results if someone looked up ‘Halo 3 for Xbox 360.’

The last example is single words compared to two separate words. Say someone typed in ‘Xbox360’ rather than ‘Xbox 360’ with a space in between to separate the words, by adding both those tags to your meta keywords, it will help the chances if someone searched for it with a space or not.

Please see image below for the meta keyword tag code:

Now these meta tags will not guarantee but it will definitely help. Someone I know who did this said their traffic increased by 5% - 15% so that may be a large chunk or just a few extras visitors, but either way, it does help.

And most importantly, I hope this will help all of you guys.

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