META TAG TIPS | Search Engine Submission

Meta Tags and How To Use Them

Your meta tags perform an important purpose within the search engine optimization process. Before delving into your meta tags and how to use them, let's regress a little and learn how a spider (bot) works on a web page. By understanding the bot, you'll understand the importance of the tag.

The search engine spider enters your site. Let's say that you have two column for simplicity sake. The spider will start at the top left side and read left to right though each column. Thus, it is imperative that you provide the spider a clear path by providing text links to the most important pages of your site, be it through your navigation or simply at the bottom of each page.

There are three important items that the spider is looking for on your web page?

Your URL
Your Site/web page title
Description Meta Tag

Meta Title Tag

The title should contain one or more of your keywords that strongly identifies what the information on your web page is about.

Short descriptions- works better for navigational queries.
Longer descriptions - works for SEO and informational queries.
Keywords should be within the Title Tag.

Meta Description Tag

The description tag is important because the search engine uses the description to determine the topic or theme of the content. The description can be two to three sentences long with keywords woven into the description.

Description Meta Tags - No two pages in your website should be the same. If the descriptions of your web pages are exactly the same, Google or any search engine will assume it's a boilerplate template and may ignore your content completely.
Create descriptions that accurately describes the specific page. The description will give the search engine and the searcher an idea what your web page is about.
home page description - use site level description on your home page
If you don't have time to accurately describe the content on each page, at least, make sure your home page and your most popular pages have specific descriptions for the search engines.
Meta descriptions do not have to be just sentence descriptions. For example, a blog can list the author, date of publication, or byline information; or a product page can place information such as product, manufacturer and price in their tag.

Keywords Tag

How about the keywords tag? The large search engines such as Google and Yahoo no longer utilizes this tag, but the small search engines still may utilize them. The keywords tag holds a minor role for the search engine spiders to gather. This is due in part to webmasters using irrelevant keywords to identify their web pages.

If the spider can follow your keywords, your keyword rich navigation and tags, they will be able to properly index your content.

Google Meta Tags Odds and Ends

Here are some additional Meta Tag help for specific situations that you may encounter: These commands below are relevant to Google.

Cache Page:

The Cache Page that Google creates is used by Google in the event your website is unavailable. If you don't want Google to create a cache page than within the head put:

META Name="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOARCHIVE"

The "NOODP" tells the robots not to use the blocks the Open Directory Project description of the page from being used.

META Name="ROBOTS" content="NOODP"

Note: content="NONE" means to "NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW" it does not mean that there are no restrictions on the page.

Other Meta Tags to Consider:

<meta name="robots" content="index,follow"> -tells the search engines to index and follow all links on the page.

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow">-tells the search engines to not index the page, but follow the links.

<meta name="robots" content="index,nofollow">-tells the search engines to index the page, but not follow the links.

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">-tells the search engines not to index or follow the page. Why would you have this one? If you to much duplicate content, and you are wanting a way to clean the duplicate content, but keep it on your site, the noindex, nofollow will make sure that Google does not pull it into their database. This action, is a webmaster call, and not one to consider lightly.

Seasonal Page:

If you have seasonal page, you can have Google
stop crawling that page by using the "unavailable_after" tag.

Submitting Your Site to the Search Engines

After all the checks, it is now time to put your web page onto the Internet and bring the search engines to your site. How? You can manually submit to the search engines or you can have a SEO service do it for you, or you can submit your site using several of the free services I've listed below. The choice is yours.

If you decide to submit your Home Page through the submission services, be sure to have the following at your fingertips:

1) URL
2) Page Title (Meta Tag Title)
3) Keywords Relevant to your home page
4) Your Home Page Description
5) Contact Information
6) Categories-where your website fits in-Technology, Nature, etc.

SEO Submission Services

Some of the sites are free to add your url, while others are not. If you want to try the manual process and not go through the SEO submission services here is a short list to get you started.

Google

Altavista

All The Web

DMOZ

Yahoo

Hot Bot

Excite

Webcrawler

Free SEO Submission Services

If on the other hand you want to get your new site in the directories quickly, and you lack the knowledge to do it yourself, you can use their free service to begin to get your site noticed.

AddMe -- Their free service will submit your site to: Google, Scrub the Web, Bigfinder, Fyber Search, ExactSeek, InfoTiger, FocusLook, WalHello, Jayde, EntireEeb, Mixcat, SearchSight, WhatuSeek, e-SiteSecrets, Tower Search, Burf, Feedplex, WebSquash, Anoox, GhetoSearch.
AddPro - SEO Submission Service that will submit your website to 18 directories.

These are two examples. To look for other services do a Google search under "SEO Submission Services".

Before submitting, be sure that you have no broken links (links that go nowhere). If you do have any broken links, the spiders will stop the indexing process.

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