What are Meta Tags?

Promotional Skills for The Chronically Amateur
(How to Get Your Message to the American Sheeple)

Part 11: What are Meta Tags?
by Shonda Ponder

© 2002, Shonda Ponder

If you've followed all of the ideas and information I've presented to you so far, then you are well on your way to making your message work for you. With the information that is presented so far, you have completed all the necessary steps in making a grass-roots effort come alive. With the new recruits you gather using these techniques, you will be able to make your message go further than you have ever dreamed possible.

So, now we are going to discuss a few more ways to tweak your work so that your message will be seen by many more eyes, and we will discuss the importance of each of them as they relate to your success.

Let's talk about metatags for a moment.

"What in the world are Meta Tags?!", you are thinking.

According to one marketing business on the internet, "Meta tags are an important part of a site's Internet presence and visibility. They are specific instructions for search engines spiders and robots." But, if you're like me, that didn't tell you what you want to know. The best way I know how to explain it is like this:

In most of the HTML mark up of nearly all web sites on the internet is a section where you can place the title of your page. This section is usually marked in the HTML code by the HEAD <> tags. Inside these tags, you can put a keyword and description code into your webpage that will attract search engines.

Search engine companies will regularly "spider" the internet for new sites and pages to add to their search engine's performance. This automated process also serves to "rank" your site's visibility. Most people on the internet will use a search engine to find what they are looking for.

Wouldn't it be nice if that person saw a link to your site every time they looked for something on the internet?

The goal is to get your site ranked in the top ten position when using certain keywords in a search engine to look for information. Many times, it is useless to put one keyword in a metatag that best describes your article. The best thing to do is type in several good keywords that describe your website.

To demonstrate how this works, go to http://www.1blink.com (a search engine web site that searches about five or ten engines when you type keywords about information you are looking for into the search field at the top of the page). When you get there, type in "Friends". This is a good keyword for Friends of Liberty, since the word is widely used, and is part of the title. When the search completes, you will probably not see "Friends of Liberty" on the front page.

Most people who use the search engines don't go past the first couple of pages of results. So, we want to try to get on the first page. Another fact: Most people will type in more than one keyword when they are looking for information. So now, type in Friends and Liberty. (separate the two words with a comma). The first thing you see in the results of the search is a link to the Friends of Liberty web site.

"How did you do that?" you ask.

We use Meta Tags. There are many ways you can insert metatags onto your web page file. If you are reading this from the article at the Friends of Liberty website, here is what you can do to see what it looks like if you use Windows 98. (I don't use other versions of Windows, so am unfamiliar with how to tell you to do this with other versions).

At the top of your window, you will see, in the grey area, some buttons that are titled "file", "edit", "view", "go", "favorites", and "help". Click on "view"
Click on "source" in the "view" drop down box that you just accessed You will see a notepad open up with the HTML source code of the web page. To see what the metatags look like, look between the HEAD <> sections, below the TITLE <> section. You will see Meta Name <> tags with the variable for "Keywords" and "Description" which will be entered into any search engine that "spiders" this page. Notice the keywords in the "Keywords" section of the meta tags: promotion, advertising, amateur, Friends of liberty. This means that if a search engine has spidered this page (which is rather doubtful if this page was just published) then you can access this page using that search engine via those keywords.

When creating meta tags, make sure your keywords and description are relevent to the content of the page on which they are encoded.

If you are looking for ways to create your own meta tags, you can find scripts pretty much anywhere on the internet. Here is one that will get you started at Hotscripts.com . According to one webmaster, "Don't be discouraged if you fail to get meta tags to work for you. Sometimes, even your best efforts will fail."

This is Part 11 of "Promotional Skills for the Chronically Amateur"

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