There is a hidden element in your webpage that can help your marketing efforts considerably.  Although many webmasters tend to ignore these little gems, the fact of the matter is that they can help you to outdo your competition in many cases.  I’m talking about meta tags and the proper use of them.  Of course, along with the proper use of these tags comes a cautionary statements as well.  Meta tags optimization needs to be approached properly or else you run the risk of being dropped from the search engines or being buried so deep that nobody is ever going to find you at all.

The most important element as far as meta tags optimization is concerned is the title of the webpage itself.  This is something that you should take a considerable amount of time optimizing and writing.  First of all, you should always be including your target keyword or keyword phrase within the title tag itself.  After all, this is what people are going to see whenever they are searching on Google and other search engines.  If you use the target keyword phrase and people search for that phrase, it will become bold whenever they are viewing it in the search engines.  This can increase your click through rate considerably.

Another important part of meta tags optimization is making sure that you put a compelling line in the title tag as well.  Although it may be enough for you to simply to include the keyword phrase that you are targeting, adding a few additional words which will entice the people to click on the link to your website can be quite beneficial.  For example, if your keyword phrase was “dog training” you would want to use something enticing in the title tag that included the keyword phrase, such as “Dog Training Tips and Tricks”.

Another important part of meta tags optimization is the description tag.  Although many people consider this to be a dead tag, the search engines still use it, at the very least for text in the search engine results.  Even Google from time to time will still use the description tag although for some reason or another they will, at times, simply pull random text off of the webpage.  Make sure that you include your target keyword phrase in the description tag as well as a call to action.  It may give you a little boost in the search engines but if you use the tag correctly, you will see a jump in your visitors from the search engines.

The only other meta tag that really should be looked at is the keyword tag.  This is not as important of an element in meta tags optimization as it used to be but it is still worth including.  Use your target keywords as well as a view related keyword phrases that are included on the webpage.  Be careful not to overdo it or it may be considered spamming by the search engines and you could receive a penalty.

Another great way to drive traffic to your website is to take advantage of manual traffic exchanges.

Tags: meta tags, meta tags optimization, search engine optimization, SEO

This entry was posted on Friday, February 27th, 2009 at 7:08 pm and is filed under SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.