Meta-Tags

Meta-Tags

The Title tag

<title>some title words</title>
This is second of the two most important elements for good rankings. Make sure that the page's search term is contained in this tag, and place it as near to the front as is reasonable, whilst ensuring that it reads well. There's nothing wrong with placing the search term up front on its own, followed by a period; e.g. "Pagerank. Google's PageRank and how to make the most of it". The target search term is, of course, "PageRank". Obviously each page's Title tag should be different to the Title tags on the site's other pages.

The Description tag

<meta name="description" content="a nice description">
Some search engines, such as Google, don't display the Description like they used to do but, even so, it should still be included in each page for those engines that do, and for the odd times when even Google displays it. Write an appealing description for the page and incorporate the page's search term into it at least once and, preferably, twice. Place one instance of it at the start or as near to the start as is reasonably possible.

The Keywords tag
<meta name="keywords" content="some keywords">
The words in the Keywords tag were never treated as keywords by the search engines; they were treated as text on the page. The tag isn't as effective as it used to be but there is no reason to leave it out. So put plenty of relevant keywords into the tag and include the search term once at the front, and a second time further along the line. There is no need to seperate keywords and keyphrases with commas, as is often done, since the engines ignore commas.

The Heading tag

The H tag <Hn>some heading words</Hn>

"n" is a number from 1 to 6; the biggest heading size being 1. H tags are given more weight than ordinary text and, the bigger the H size, the more weight it receives. So include the target search term in H tags at least once on the page, and two or three times if possible. Also, place the first H tag as near to the top of the page as possible.

The Bold tag

Bold text

Bold text is given more weight than ordinary text but not as much as H tags. As much as is reasonable, enclose the search term in bold tags when it appears on the page.

The Alt tag

Alt text
Include the search term in the alt text of all images on the page. Keep in mind that some systems such as Braille readers and speach synthesisers use the alt text, so you might want to make them usable whilst including the search term.