Meta Tags - SEO Services

some meta tags are more important than others

It's not easy to rank well for your keywords on your website. By now, most companies no longer place their company name in the title tag of their website. Here are a few simple, effective, and most important, search engine friendly strategies to help boost your website ranking.

meta tags and seo

We will focus on the "title" meta tag and the "description" meta tag. We will not go over the "keywords" meta tag at this time since most major search engines have placed less weight on this tag. Some would actually say the keywords meta tag has no weight at all. We still suggest utilizing the "keywords" tag since there are currently no drawbacks and still deserves some merit.  

We have found the title & description tag to be the most effective. We have seen sites with title tags for example with "New Page 1" or "Welcome to my site" in the "title" tag, which really serves no purpose when it comes to search engine optimization. Also, try not to use words such as "and", "or", or "the" in either of these meta tags.

Keywords stuffing

Search engines evaluate keyword prominence, keyword weight, and keyword density when determining a website's optimization ranking. All three are calculated individually for the page, the title tag, the description tag, as well as other areas on a page. Keyword prominence means how close the keyword is to the beginning of your page. Keyword weight refers to how many times a particular keyword or phrase can be found on the page. Keyword density is the ratio of the keyword to the other words on the page. You do not want the keyword weight or density to be too high, as this can appear to the search engine as "keyword stuffing" and most search engines penalize sites that stuff their keywords.

navigational structure

Place your navigational links (and JavaScript) at the right or at the bottom, but not on the left, of the page. When the search engines spider  your site, they read from the top left to the bottom right. Search engines place an emphasis on the first 100 words or text on the site. You do not want these words to be navigational links or Javascript. Ideally, you want to have your "heading" tags with your keywords in the beginning of your page. This being said, placing your links, on the right or bottom of your page ensures the search engine spiders get to the text first, giving more weight to what's important on your page.

utilization of alt tags on graphical images

Place alt tags on all of your images. Search engine spiders cannot "read" pictures or images. The only way a search engine spider knows what an image is about is by reading the alt tag. This is also another chance to place more of your keywords in your HTML, improving your page's keyword weight density. Alt tags are easy to make and they can make a big difference in your sites keyword ranking.
A simple alt tag looks like this: alt="put your keyword phrase here." Search engines separately calculate keyword prominence, density, and weight in alt tags as well, so optimize your tags.

bottom of the page

Place your keywords at the bottom of your page. Just as search engines place more weight on the first words of your page, they also do the same to the last words. The general thinking is this, if your site is about a certain subject, then the main points, or keywords, should, appear at the beginning, be spread throughout the page, and be prominent at the conclusion. But if you have all of your navigational links and JavaScript at the bottom, your relevant page text could end well before the HTML does. An easy way to have your keywords at the bottom of your page is to include them in the copyright information. For example, if you have a dog food website, you could have something like this at the very bottom of the page:  copyright 2012 yoursite.com World's best dog food Search engines are not (as of this writing), penalizing sites using this technique, and it wouldn't really make much sense for them to do so.

anchor text

The Anchor Text of your links. Anchor text is the actual linking text on a website. It is what the user clicks on to navigate to that particular site or page. If a search engine finds many links to your site using the term "dog food", then the search engine concludes your site is about "dog food". Do not over do this.
This is overlooked quite often, but it seems to have a very large impact on your search engine rankings for a particular keyword. Your anchor text needs to be the keyword or phrase you are trying to target.

Try to avoid anchor text such as "Click Here" or "www.yoursite.com" Also, if you're running a reciprocal link campaign, be sure to use variations of your text. If an engine notices every link to your site is identical, it could place less weight on these links or potentially penalize your website. This is because search engines generally give more weight to "naturally occurring" links, and less to "reciprocal link exchange campaigns".

Using different, but relevant anchor text can dramatically affect your targeted keyword rankings, by making your links appear more natural. Effective SEO may seem difficult at first, but as you have read above, common sense that require little or no programming knowledge, can make a huge impact on your website's keyword ranking.

In summary, be realistic. This is why search engine optimization services are expensive. It's because it really does take a lot of work, dedication, endurance and commitment.