Re: Meta Tags

>>>>>
Just wondering. I know about meta tags and how they work (I think.)
The ones that I always include are the title, keyword, and description
metas. What one's do you favor and why. I would appreciate the input if
you have the time :)
<<<<<

I use exactly the same meta tags (well, actually the title is not a meta
tag).

Keywords:

I use the keywords because for the search sites that do use them in
their search results, it is a good place to put the following:

1) keywords and phrases that might apply to the entire site, but perhaps
not to a particular page.

2) mispellings of those keywords and phrases. For instance, you might
discover that people consitantly mispell guages as gages.

I do not rely upon keywords to do more than the above.

Title: 

I use this since it any keywords or phrases in the title gives a boost
to the web site. 

Also, it is an important part of bookmarking. For instance, actually
start the Title (esp for the home page) with the name of the company.
Too many sites (for whatever reason), have a company name of say,
Woo-Cow, which is a company that specializes in cow removal, and do the
title as: 

They wander, we remove 'em, Woo-Cow's!!

Of course, what do they remove? And when looking down a set of
bookmarks, if you can remember it has something to do with Woo or cows,
it is not immediately evident from looking down a list of browser
bookmarks.

The title might bettter be done as:

Woo-Cow's - cow removal 

You would probably want more, but that is the general gist of it.

Finally, the title appears as the link part of the search result in
almost all instances.

Description:

Descriptions no longer give a boost to rankings. However, they have the
following advantages:

If the searc engine uses them, they will put the description in the
search results below the title, instead of doing an automatic extraction
of text from the page. 

It allows you to do a little marketing spin to give the person who is
looking through the search results the information to enable them to
click through. 

Again: the description IS NOT used by the search engines to boost
relevancy or are the words in the description searched.



-- 


Jim Tom Polk -:- jtpolk(at)austin.rr.com 
"You might as well fall flat on your face 
 as lean over too far backwards."         - James Thurber
"The Universe is run by the complex interweaving of three 
  elements: energy, matter and enlightened self-interest."
     		                      - G'Kar  "Survivors"

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