My Travels on the Net

Many of us have heard that meta tags are important when optimizing your website for the search engines but most of us don't really understand what they are, how they help and what we can do to use them to our advantage.

Wikipedia defines meta tags this way, "Meta elements (or meta tags) provide information about a given webpage, most often to help search engines categorize them correctly, and are inserted into the HTML code in the format illustrated above, but are not visible to a user looking at the site."

One of the most important meta tags is the title tag. If you go to Google and do a search on "eMarketing Strategist", the following is the first result returned. The title tag is the text that reads "eMarketing Strategist - Internet marketing that gets results..."

As you can see from this example, your title tag is usually the first text a searcher sees so you definitely want to have a good title tag. The challenging part is writing a title tag that makes both the search engines and searchers happy.

Recently, Jill Whalen, author of the great SEO newsletter High Rankings Advisor, wrote a very helpful article on title tags called All About Title Tags. Check it out and be sure to sign up for her newsletter while you're on her website.

Jill Whalen of High Rankings® is an internationally recognized search engine optimization consultant and host of the free weekly High Rankings® Advisor search engine marketing newsletter. Jill's handbook, "The Nitty-gritty of Writing for the Search Engines" teaches business owners how and where to place relevant keyword phrases on their Web sites so that they make sense to users and gain high rankings in the major search engines.Jill specializes in search engine optimization, SEO consultations, site analysis reports, SEM seminars and is the co-founder of Search Engine Marketing New England (SEMNE) a local networking organization.

posted by Elge Premeau  # 3:59 PM