Creating
an attractive and useful website is half the job
done - your ultimate purpose is to attract buyers
to your products. Left to itself, your website
has as much chance of being noticed as a grain
of sand in sea beach. There are billions of web-pages
in the www sphere - how does the customers find
your website ?
There are many ways of attracting
customers to your website - but probably the most
important is to use search engines.
Most surfers use search engines to
locate websites - arguably the most popular Internet
application after e-mail. Your website should
not only be in the database of major search engines
(Yahoo, Alta Vista etc.) but also rank among the
top 15-20 sites in any search result using your
product as keyword.
For this to happen, one of the key
requirements is a set of carefully designed meta
tags for your web pages.
To understand meta tags, we need
to discuss a little on how search engines work.
As we all know, search engines collect information
about web-sites, index and finally store it in
searchable database for retrieval by web surfers.
Most search engines use automated
tools (an euphemism for computer programs) to
locate web-sites and collect relevant information.
These are called 'spiders'. Just as real-life
spiders run up and down its cob web, web spiders
crawl through thousands of web-pages and collect
relevant information for search engines.
Web spiders look for meta tags in
web-page for extracting relevant information about
a web-site. This is an excellent opportunity for
you to pass right information about your site
to the search engine so that you are 'indexed'
under the category of your choice.
Meta tags, are a few simple lines
of code at the header of HTML pages that ensure
the visiting spider finds the information you
want it to. The two tags that are the most important
are the "description" tag and the "keywords" tag.
The description tag gives the search engine the
description that you want for your web site. Without
this tag, search engines will usually take the
first text it finds from your site and make that
the description.
The keywords tag tells the search
engine exactly which keywords you want your site
to be searchable under. Without this tag, a search
engine will choose words for your site to be searchable
under from the title and text of your site.
Without meta tags, spiders either
do not index your site or use a default method
that will certainly result in poor ranking of
your site. Remember, if your site does not appear
within top 15-20 sites in any search result using
your product as keyword - not many surfers are
going to find your site from the search engine.
It should be understood that meta
tags are not a turnkey solution for getting your
site to the top of search engine lists. They will
help to get your site indexed correctly and they
increase the relevancy for the keywords you choose
but they do not guarantee top placement.
I can almost hear you screaming 'I
am Not an Expert - How do I create right Meta
Tags ??? '
Next week, We shall discuss a few
simple techniques and free resources in the Net
that will help you set out on the right course.
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