Section 8.3. Meta Information Tactics


8.3. Meta Information Tactics

In the early days of SEO, intelligent use of meta information was a crucial element of SEO. But since anyone can add any meta keyword and description information they'd like to a site or page, the feature has been widely abusedand search engines discount meta data in favor of automated page content analysis using PageRank and other variables.

That said, the price of adding meta informationit's freeis right, so you should add it to each page as a matter of standard SEO practice. Try to provide targeted

meta keyword lists and descriptions (for example, the samples I provided just above are way too general to be helpful as SEO).

Meta keywords should be limited to a dozen or so terms. Don't load up the proverbial kitchen sink. Think hard about the keywords that you'd like to lead to your site when visitors search.


Note: Meta tags can contain a lot more than just descriptions and keywords, including (but not limited to) a technical description of the kind of content on a page, and even the character encoding used:

One kind of page that really does need a meta description and keyword listeven todayis the page that primarily consists of images. Recall that I've suggested that as a matter of SEO you avoid such pages. But if you can't help yourself, or have bowed to unspeakable pressure applied by your web designer, you should know that Google and other search engines won't have a clue what is on your pageunless you describe it for the search engine using meta information.


Tip: If you want to include a phrase containing more than one term in your keyword list, quote it. For example: "digital photography". However, there is not much point in including a compound term if the words in the phrase ("digital" and "photography") are already included as keywords.

For the keywords that are really significant to your site, you should include both single and plural forms, as well as any variants. For example, a site about photography might well want to include both "photograph" and "photography" as meta tags.

Meta Includes

An include file is code referenced, and opened when it is referenced, in another file. It's easy to use includes on the Web in many file formats, including .shtml (like HTML but with server-side includes) and .php.

As a matter of site architecture, meta information should be put in include files referenced by each web page. You can have multiple meta includes, with each include referenced by pages in a different portion of your site.

The advantage of doing this is that it is easy to modify meta information across a site (or across portions of a site with related content).




Search Engine Optimization
The Truth About Search Engine Optimization
ISBN: 0789738317
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 54
Authors: Rebecca Lieb

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