Meta Tags Are Important To Some Search Engines If Not ALL

META TAGS ARE AN IMPORTANT PART OF YOUR WEB PAGE

Meta tags are something that you can never afford to overlook from the perspective of search engine optimization. You can avoid many mistakes by including these. Using meta tags is one of the surest methods to avoid 'spamming' the search. Following are the three most common and the most important meta tags that are used in SEO.

Meta Page Title Tag

The title tag is supported by all search engines and should be considered as the most important element in your optimization process. Why? The page title is the first thing visible to search engine spiders as well as your human visitors. They can see your title at the top of the page in the browser and it is the title that becomes the all-important clickable link in the listings on the major search engine pages. These should as a result be accurate and concise, and should also include your important keywords. The title tag is usually an interesting, eye-catching headline with all important keywords used once.

Meta Description Tag

Most of the search engines support the meta description tag. Though it is somewhat less important than the Title Tag since the human visitor will not be able to see it, the description is often included in the search listings beneath the title tag and hence should be a correct and keyword-rich description of everything the page stands for. Google normally uses a gist of the webpage content; it will only use the meta description tag when it is not able to find sufficient page content to create a page description.

Meta Keywords Tag

This tag is very rarely useful mainly because it has been abused to the maximum. However, one cannot do without this tag either. It should be used very carefully and with a lot of judgment. Include your main keywords here. Repeating them and/or using related keywords 4 or 5 times is ideal. It is far better to include your keywords in the page content; that will be far more important in attracting the attention of the search engines.

Page Ranking And How Google Assigns It

PAGERANK: WHAT IS IT AND HOW IS IT ASSIGNED?

It is a known fact that Google assigns every single website page a Google Page rank, which is based on a complicated mathematical algorithm. Pages are ranked on a scale with zero as the lowest and ten as the highest. Interlinking of websites – external as well as inter – holds value so far as Page Rank is concerned.

If the site X links to the site Y, the latter gets credited with a percentage of Site X's Page Rank which kind of gets passed cover to it. The Site X loses nothing so far as Page Rank is concerned – unless and until the link is to a bad neighborhood or a banned area.

An example to understand the situation better. Site X had a Page Rank of 5, there were only 2 outbound links to Site X. One of the outbound Links was intended to brand new Site Y. Brand new Site Y had 4 outgoing links, with NO other Incoming Links, apart from the one from Site X. Google awarded Site Y a Page Rank of 5.

From this example in real life, it is evident that fewer outbound links on a per page basis means a higher Page Rank.

If Site X in the above example had a huge amount of outgoing links on the page, in that case the percentage of Page Rank passed would have been smaller and the New Site Y would have received a lower rank than the equal rank that was passed.

Things to avoid

While engaging in reciprocal linking, make sure you check the amount of outbound links that not only the page has but the overall site as well. Search engines such as Google doesn't like pornography sites, gambling sites and Link Farms that have thousands of links on them. Unless that is your business, don't link to any of those types of sites.

You can lose Page Rank and Search Engine Results if you link to sites that are considered Bad Neighborhoods or are Banned. Be alert and make sure you check before linking. Though sometimes you may not be "punished", you won’t be gaining any benefits and the loss in PR of your site is not at all worth it.

Be aware of which sites the outbound links are linking your site to. Check your outbound links from time to time, ensuring that they are:

1) Still an active website
2) Still a resource for the reason you linked to them in the first place
3) They have not changed formats or the theme and continue to be a quality site.

Page Rank improves over time. Though not very often, Google does update the Page Rank, once in say every four to eight months. So link exchange with like-themed sites or quality sites is the best possible SEO strategy.