Meta, Title, Header Tags and More Tips...

META TAGS - TITLE, DESCRIPTION AND ROBOTS
The Meta Tags and Title go in the Head section of your HTML and let Search Engines know what was important on a Webpage and so how to rank its importance. They can also tell the Search Engine what language it is written in and other files it needs to take into account. Typically it will look something like this:

[HEADER]
[TITLE]Cheap Halloween Costumes for Children and Adults[/TITLE]
[META name=”description” content=”Very Cheap Prices on Halloween Costumes for all Ages”]
[META name=”keywords” content=”Halloween Costumes, Halloween, Very Cheap”]
[/HEADER]

The Title Meta Tag is extremely important and is widely used by the SE’s most importantly Google. Make it between 5-10 words and put your best Keyword/Phrase at the beginning e.g. ‘Halloween Costumes’.

The Description Meta Tag should be less than 150 characters in order to suit all Search Engines. Anything more than this will simply be missed out with some SE’s. The “description” is what most SE’s use to describe your site when listed in its results. Make sure it is ENTICING for potential customers. It should include at least 5 of your best keywords but DO NOT simply repeat all of them in your “description”.

The Keywords Meta Tag should be a string of keywords and 2-or-3 word phrases that people surfing the net might use to find pages like yours. It is a very common opinion amongst many experts that the “keywords” Meta Tag is used very little if at all by SE’s these days. This is very true but since some SE’s do still use them to some degree DO NOT repeat your keywords more than 3 times in either your
“keywords” Meta Tag or your “description” Meta Tag. Some SE’s will consider this as ‘Keyword Spamming’ and your site could be seriously penalized.

The Robots Meta Tag is a simple instruction that goes in between the [HEAD] and [/HEAD] tags of your web page and tells any visiting Search Engine Robots whether than can index that page (INDEX, NO INDEX) or follow the links leaving that page (FOLLOW, NO FOLLOW). There are basically 4 variations of these instructions:

1. [META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”INDEX,FOLLOW”]
2. [META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX,FOLLOW”]
3. [META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”INDEX,NOFOLLOW”]
4. [META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW”]

ROBOTS.TXT FILE
The Robots.txt file is actually the first thing Search Engine Robots will see when they visit your site. With the use of a Robots.txt file we can tell Search Engines what areas of your site are out of bounds. There are also many other uses for the Robots.txt file but I won’t talk about it here. Using a text editor (notepad, BBedit etc) create a new file and name it, yes you guessed it: robots.txt.

Place in it the following syntax:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /pictures/
Disallow: style.css

This syntax tells Search Engine that it may not look in to the folders “cgi-bin” or “pictures” (these could actually be any directories you name). Save the file, upload it to the root of your website i.e. yourdomain.com/robots.txt and that’s it.

HEADER/TEXT FORMATING TAGS
OK here are the three most important tags used for formatting your text:
[H1] the Main Heading Tag, tells the SE the pages main topic
[H2] a Second Heading and slightly smaller (e.g. subheading)
[p] paragraph and the body of text and content

A typical layout of your HTML code, and therefore your text, should look like this.

[HTML]
[HEAD]
[BODY]

[H2]Title of Your Page Starting with you Keyword Phrase[/H2]
[H3]Subtitle Including Some other Keywords/Phrase[/H3]
[p] Lots of useful information with the odd keyword thrown in but good useful information is what really makes a site successful, after all, Content is King. [/p]
[H3]Next Subtitle Including Some other Keywords/Phrase[/H3]
[p] Lots ore useful information with the odd keyword thrown in but good useful information is what really makes a site successful after all Content is King. [/p]

[/BODY]
[/HTML]

ALT TAGS
These provide the Search Engine Robots with a description for any images you have on your page.

They look as follows:
[img xsrc=”" mce_src=”" alt=”boys policeman costume ” width=”50″ height=”50″ /]
Place in good descriptive key words here without going over board i.e. no spamming the same words in every images alt tag 3 times each.