Here’s another in our series looking at Bill Hartzer’s search engine tips. The meta keywords tag is one of the less important places for keywords in terms of impact on your rankings in the search engines. Back in the 1990s, “meta tags” were all the rage. But they were so easy to abuse that they count for very little today, and Google states that they explicitly ignore the meta keywords tag.

Why bother? Well, first it’s very little bother at all. Second, some search engines do factor in your meta keywords tag content. And third, it may be the only place you should list common misspellings of your keywords. Put those misspellings almost anywhere else and they’ll be visible in one form or another, making it look like you don’t know how to spell.

The meta keyword tag resides in the code for your web page, and  using this page as an example, it might look like this:

<meta name=”keywords” content=”search engine optimization tips, search engine spider, web pages that suck, seo, keywords, search engine optimization tips”>

Check out Bill’s article here.

Bill Hartzer has an excellent blog on search engine optimization (SEO), and he’s started a series of search engine tips that I think you’ll find very valuable. Last month I wrote about his first tip, relating to the Page Title.

This month the focus is on the Meta Description tag, part of the HTML code for a web page that describes what the page is about. It’s important, not as much because it makes a big difference in your rankings, although it does help a little. What’s more important is that it may show up in the search engine results for your page. Here’s an example of the listing for one of our clients, found when someone searches in Google for NJ probate litigation lawyers:

The two lines beneath the headline and above the green URL are the beginning of the meta description tag for this page.

It’s important to make your meta description tag a meaningful description of what’s on your page, and to make it read easily and make sense. It’s a mistake to cram a bunch of keywords into it, because when people scan search engine results, their eye will be caught by meaningful sentences , and they’ll be more likely to click on such a listing. I recommend Bill’s article on the meta description tag. Check it out.

The title tag is one of the most important factors in achieving high search engine rankings. The title tag is in the HTML code of each of your web pages, and it appears not on your web page anywhere, but in the title bar of your web browser: right next to the Internet Explorer logo or the Firefox logo at the very top left of your browser window.

Sometimes, just fixing the title tags of your pages can improve your rankings a lot. We see this especially in web sites developed by novices. If you’ve created your own web site, you may not have thought about the title tag. If that’s the case, your title tags may all be the same — saying something like “Home Page” or “New Page 1″. Title tags like that will only help you if you sell “home pages” or “new pages”.

You need to have your keywords in your title tags — different title tags for every page because you should have different target keywords for every page. You can include your company name on some or all of your title tags, but keep in mind that the search engiens only read the first 10-12 words or 60-80 characters, so if your page is focusing on critical keywords, make sure they’re within the first 60-80 characters of your title tag

The words in your title tags show up as the headline for your listing in the search engine results page (SERP), and changing them to be more appealing or informative to potential customers may result in more clickthroughs as well as higher rankings.

The keywords and phrases you use in your Meta description tag don’t affect your page’s ranking in the search engines (for the most part), but this tag can still come in handy in your overall SEO campaigns.

What Is the Meta Description Tag?

The Meta description tag is a snippet of HTML code that doesn’t appear visibly on your web page, but which is nevertheless visible to the search engines.

It used to be thought that the purpose of the Meta description tag was twofold: to help the page rank well  for the words tit contained, and to provide a nice description in the search engine results pages. That’s changed, though, and today the words in the meta description tag aren’t given any weight in the ranking algorithms of Google, and only a small amount of weight in the other search engines.

SEO expert Jill Whalen explains everything you’d ever want to know about meta description tags in an article on her web site.