META Tags are the most important tags that search engines use to categorize, prioritize and rank your website. Meta tags provide a very concise fashion for website owners to categorize their site by the most appropriate keywords and descriptions. Because of the great flexibility in giving the opportunity for webmasters to categorize their webpages, this also opens up the issue of abuse. Bear in mind that search engines have algorithms to prevent abuse of excessive meta tags, so there are some general principles that webmasters should adhere to such as:

Keep META Tags Short But Concise

Many webmasters realize that search engines use Description and Keyword META tags heavily and try taking advantage of this by writing very long descriptions and keywords. Search engines have a finite database and will only index a certain portion of your website. Try to keep your META tags simple and to the point. Search engines take into account the number of occurrences of each tag and may penalize your website’s rankings if you overuse META tags.

Avoid Using All Upper Case (Caps)

Some search engines used to prioritize websites that started with capital letters or those that had special characters such as numbers. This technique may still work with some older search engines, but beware that search engines are constantly on the lookout for abusers.

Avoid “Bridge” Pages

Bridge pages are pages which redirect a user to another page, which is often the page that the webmaster intended a user to go to directly. This practice is strongly discouraged by search engines as it clutters their databases with useless pages and opens the opportunity for users to spam search engines with irrelevant pages. Bridge pages are mostly associated with the META Refresh Tag.

Prioritize Your Keywords

Some search engines will read only the first few lines of your webpages to get an overview of your website. Search engines which do this may miss some of your META tags. As such, you should put focus on your description and keywords META tags with priority on the first few words.

Avoid Repetition

Try to avoid repeating the same keywords or descriptions in your meta tags. Often, search engines will degrade your rankings when they detect repetition of the same words in your META Tags. Should you need to use repetition, separate the repeated words from each other by a few other keywords.

An example of META tag usage:

<META NAME=”keywords” CONTENT=”keywords, seperated, by, commas, 255, chars, maximum”>
<META NAME=”description” CONTENT=”Describe your website here, 255 characters maximum”>
<META HTTP-EQUIV=”Content-Language” CONTENT=”EN”>
<META NAME=”author” CONTENT=”Author Name Here, 75 characters maximum”>
<META NAME=”copyright” CONTENT=”Copyright statement, 255 characters”>
<META NAME=”robots” CONTENT=”FOLLOW,INDEX”>

Reference: Submit Corner

If your website/blog uses images, image maps or pictures, you should always make use of the ALT tag. ALT tags are a property of the <img src> tag. It displays alternative text for users who cannot load images or have a problem loading an image. Search engines don’t see images, they read a website, so it’s a good idea to give your images a ALT description. In other words, giving your images alternative descriptions, will give search engines a verbal description of your images.

If your website/blog consits of a large number of images, it is vital to use alternative tags, as with many images, your content will probably be on a minimal side. A good image to always give an alterative tag to is the header image at the top of your website - this is often one of the first things a search engine will view.

The general layout of this tag is as follows:

<IMG SRC="image.ext" ALT="Alternative text in here">

An example would be:

<IMG SRC="header.jpg" ALT="Webtrepreneur Home Page">

The above example would give search engines a great idea of what the website is all above. I would suggest going a little further than my example above, and rather use the alternative tag to describe the website, like so:

<IMG SRC="header.jpg" ALT="Webtrepreneur making money online">

This will allow the search engine to understand your website right from the beginning. For Adsense users, this is a excellent way to get your adverts displaying relative media on a website with a large quantity of images.

When we deal with hyphens and unscores in domain names, we need to have an understanding of what Google does with these two characters. Without the knowledge, we will not be sure how to optimize our websites for search engines - which would prove to do detrimental. Google sees hyphens as dividers in domain names and in the content of a website. Underscores are ignored completely by Google.

In order to prove that hyphens are seen as dividers and that underscores are ignored by Google, a test is required. I spent some time searching online for an example, as I have not had a chance to run a test myself, and wanted to get this article out, after reading a comment by WizardMan.

The filename: wagatukepo-sitynozfau-mazidipole_vukertalet.php was created firstly, and a Google search was performed for these 4 keywords. Google yielded no results for these key words. The site was submitted to Google, and once indexed by Google, another set of searches was performed for these keys words. The results may be seen below:

Results: wagatukepo: 1 Google result sitynozfau: 1 Google result
mazidipole: No Google result vukertalet: No Google result
mazidipole_vukertalet: 1 Google result

With the above results, we can see that Google sees hyphens as dividers in URLs and ignores underscore. The second test required, is to test whether Google sees hyphens as dividers and that underscores are ignored in the content of a website. The second test yielded the following results:

Results: bozaketerp: 1 Google result boujulanbi: 1 Google result
vorismetapalu: No Google result terplamili: No Google result
vorismetapalu_terplamili: 1 google result

Once again we can see that, Google sees hyphens as dividers in the content and the underscores are ignored.

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Getting your site well known, and highly ranked on search engines seems to be the aim of the game these days. Back links and search engine optimization are two of the most concentrated on topics floating around the blogosphere, and between website authors.

Today, I bring you another free advertising medium. Within two minutes, you will have another back link to add to your collection. I talked about Blogvertise not too long ago, and it has proven to be successful in increasing peoples traffic. I have received a good collection of emails from people thanking me for the free service. So, without waiting any longer, let me get onto this fantastic new service.

Tagspage is a great place to get an easy, quick and free back link to your website. There are many advantages for this:

• the tag (for the exclusive type) or the title (for the shared type) links directly to your website. This is great for your Search Engine Optimisation and will improve your ranking with search engines
• high exposure
• high traffic
• affordable and creative advertising

Tagspage offers free and paid for tags, both revolving around the same concept of choosing your tag name, and having it displayed on a board with other tags. The Webtrepreneur decided to use the paid service, as the prices were really cheap, and the traffic to the website is high, and I don’t believe in only ever using free advertising to get traffic. The cost of my tag was R336.00, as I received a discount of R144.00 for doing this review. So, all in all, it would have cost R480.00, which relative to the service offered is virtually nothing. I have already seen an increase in the traffic to this website, and the tag has only been on the website for a couple of days! You can see my tag by clicking here - Big red font on a mustard background saying ‘Web Entrepreneur’.

When purchasing tags on Tagspage, there is a wonderful pricing system, where the price changes on the fly while you choose your colours, words and sizes of the tag. I played around for a good 5 minutes until the look and price suited me.

I am very happy with my purchase, and would suggest that you head on over, and take a look for yourself, even if it is to grab a free tag while it’s still available!