Meta tags are those lovely things in your code that tell search engines a little more about your site. There are a couple of them that are commonly used for search engine optimization. They look like this:
<meta name="description" content="My company does this thing for these people." />
<meta name"keywords" content="fun things, special things, cool things, company things, fabulous things" />
Basically, the “Description” meta tag describes what your site is about. The “Keywords” meta tag says what search engine terms your site is related to. And that brings us to…
Myth #3: Jam-packing your meta tags with as many words as possible is going to make you rank higher in search engines.
Not at all true. Most search engines actively ignore your meta tags, and if they do use them, they serve only to describe your site to visitors…not to come up with your search engine ranking.
In fact, if you have 100 keywords in your meta tag, it screams “spammer,” and your ranking could actually suffer for it. So if you care to use meta tags, make them short and to the point. Include 5 or 6 keywords, and make sure that they actually relate to what your site is about. (Yes, there are people who try to bank on popular keywords even if their site has nothing to do with that term. Can you see why Google largely ignores them?)
Do this instead
Make sure that your URLs have your keywords in them. If you’re writing an article on stamp licking, make sure that the URL is something like http://mysite.com/stamp-licking. Not http://mysite.com/1230948234. You can even make variations of your keywords in your URL so that you’re capturing multiple keywords. For example http://mysite.com/stamp-licking-how-to-lick-a-stamp. (Note that a lot of people search for “how to” terms…”how to lick a stamp”, “how to wash a car”, “how to be a pop star”.)
Do this in conjunction with having your keywords in your “title” tags (like we talked about before), and you’ll be light years ahead of nearly everyone in your industry. Unless your industry is search engine optimization. In which case, you need to be looking for some ultra-competitive keywords, which we’ll dig into next week. (Ooooh…a cliff hanger. I bet you never thought I’d stoop so low.)
