Baby Stepping Towards Search Engine Optimization

One of the first things I check for when someone asks me "Why doesn't my site rank well in Google?" is their metatags.

What is a metatag?

A metatag is a line of HTML code that works behind the scenes of your webpages and tells the search engines like Google, Yahoo, or MSN what that page is about and how to rank it in search results. As such it is an important part of search engine optimization or getting your page set up to rank well in the search engines.

The four main metatags every page needs to have are:

1. a TITLE TAG that names the page and includes the most important keywords for that page.

2. a DESCRIPTION TAG that will sometimes be the text that displays below the title of your page in search engine results. Therefore it needs to both contain keyword phrases and be compelling enough to coax people to want to open you site.

3. a KEYWORD TAG that contains 2-3 of the most important keyword phrases also contained in the text of that page.

4. A ROBOTS FOLLOW TAG that tells the search engines to read and index every page of your site. (You will need to have text navigation or a site map on your site for this to work, as search engines can't read anything but text, not Javascript, Flash, imagemaps or button navigational menus). This tag looks like this: META content="index follow" name=robots

To view the metatags for any site, go to Internet Explorer and Click "View" on the Menu Bar, then in the drop-down menu, click on "Source." The metatags should be the first thing you see after the Head tag.

If these are missing or used incorrectly, they will affect your rankings in search engines. The worst offense I see in the TITLE TAG is when it says either "Home" or "Welcome to My Website" because it doesn't contain any keywords or tell you anything about the page.

The biggest mistakes I see in the KEYWORD TAG is that there is a list of dozens of single words, none of which appear in the text of that page. What that tells me is that the page hasn't been updated in at least 5 years because search engines now frown on this type of tag usage.

Stay tuned for more tips and hints on SEO.

Annette Vaillancourt
Girl Geek Web Designs: Custom Websites and SEO for Small Businesses on a Budget
1-877-866-GEEK