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A Sassy Look at Meta Tags
Posted On 27 Feb 2003
Today we have a Meta tag tutorial for beginning adult Webmasters. Meta tags can give you some degree of control over the appearance of your websites in major search engines. While use of Meta tags isn’t as important as it was just a few years ago, it still offers plenty of value, especially considering the small amount of time and energy required to learn and implement Meta tags.Today we have a Meta tag tutorial for beginning adult Webmasters. Meta tags can give you some degree of control over the appearance of your websites in major search engines. While use of Meta tags isn’t as important as it was just a few years ago, it still offers plenty of value, especially considering the small amount of time and energy required to learn and implement Meta tags. Here’s a look at the standard Meta tags that you should include on any adult website you build.
What are Meta tags? Essentially they are small lines of HTML code placed inside of the head section of your site that give the search engine spiders details about your page, thus telling it what to do with your site. Meta tags help to determine the relevancy of your site, however you need to remember that these are in no way the sole determining factor as to where your site gets ranked in the search engines. They can, however, make a difference.
Each search engine uses different ranking criteria to place your site, including your Meta tags, keyword frequency and weight, content, and site popularity. However, you can use Meta tags to include this information as it pertains to your site. These tags are placed between the <head> and </head> tags of your page. While they are transparent to your sites’ visitors, they are visible to the search engines. With this information in mind it is easy to understand how savvy implementation of other Meta tags can easily mean the difference in higher rankings, increased traffic, and more profits. The minimum basic Meta tags that you should always include in your pages are:
<title>Your Page Title</title>
This tag should be between six and twelve words long (128 characters) with at least one of your keyword, or keyword phrases, placed inside of it. Since this is the description that most search engines show surfers to entice them to enter your site, and it is also what will show up whenever a surfer “mouses over” his Favorites file, you should be careful to be grammatically correct here.
<META name=”description” CONTENT=”description”>
Here is where you use between twelve and twenty-five words (250 characters) containing your primary keywords and phrases and accurately describing your site in a grammatically correct way.
<meta name=”Keywords” content=”your keywords go here”>
Keyword phrases and keywords are both important here and should be separated with a comma. You have 1,017 characters to utilize here.
<meta name=”Robots” content=”All, Index, Follow”>
The robot tag allows you to give the search engine spider/robot specific instructions as to what you want it to do with your page. For instance, [INDEX, NO INDEX] tells the robot whether or not you want your page indexed, while [FOLLOW, NO FOLLOW] tells the robot whether or not to follow the links and index the pages of your site.
<meta name=”Distribution” content=”Global”>
This tag tells the search engine to make your content available for global distribution.
<meta name=”Revisit-After” content=”30 Days”>
This tag tells the search engine to revisit your site after X number of days since you will be adding new links. However, a word of caution here. You do not want to provoke the spiders to revisit your site more than once a month.
<meta name=”Rating” content=”Mature”>
This tag tells the search engine to index your content and give it a mature “rating.”
So, just how important are Meta tags? Well, there once was a time when Meta tags, especially keyword Meta tags, were very important for increasing your relevancy and ranking in the search engines. However, due to continuous abuse and Meta copying, most search engines have greatly lowered the importance of description and keyword Meta tags over the past several years. Of course there are still some search engines that use them, but even those search engines have greatly lowered the impact that Meta tags have on a search’s results.
However, just because description and keyword Meta tags are no longer as important as they once were does not mean that they should be completely ignored. It is a good idea for your marketing plan to include unique Meta tags on each page of your website, since this can and will make the difference between a second page ranking and a first page ranking in the search engines. This should be important to you because if the search engines cannot find your site, all of the beautiful women and wonderful graphics will not keep your site from being lost in cyberspace. As you can see, Meta tags can give your website a very valuable boost.
Follow these guidelines and your Meta tags should be well optimized. Does this mean your pages will soar to the top of your targeted results? Well, not exactly. As I mentioned before, the engines that do consider Meta tags for relevancy place a limited importance on them. But the keyword guidelines here, if used throughout your page in your title and your body content, will make a much larger impact on your results.
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Reverend Sassy is a member of The ADULTWEBMASTER Magazine’s writing staff. Her wide range of knowledge about topics of interest to adult Webmasters comes from her years of practice building and operating adult Web sites.
