Effective use of META tags

The big push in many tutorials and FAQ's that you will read about optimizing your site for search engine positioning is all about META TAGS. If you use a WYSIWYG web page authoring tool such as Microsoft FrontPage, you may not have ever SEEN a meta tag in your pages. PC Mojo is of the opinion that, while important, meta tags are NOT as important as the titles (and descriptions) of your pages and effective placement of the most important text at or near the top of each page.

Does that mean you shouldn't pay close attention to the META tags on all your pages? Certainly not, we just feel that making it an obssession won't pay the same dividends that clean, effective site design will. Plus, it's not really much fun to do, and life's short, right?

What Meta tags ARE useful for is to exercise some control over your summary data in some search engines.

Meta tags can also help you provide keywords and descriptions for any of your pages that may lack text. An example of this type of page is the PC Mojo home page, which is almost completely free of text, relying instead on graphics to display our pertinent information. This technique, while we feel it LOOKS good, presents a real challenge when trying to index the site with the search engines. Any search facility that bases its database on sending 'spiders' out would normally have a problem with a home page like ours. However, simply including a meta tag is not a guarantee that your page will enjoy a tremendous boost in the search engine listings.

The two meta tags we are concerned with:
	Description Overwrites the description of the page that the search engine would normally create.
	Keywords Provides keywords that the search engine will associate with your page. When registering pages manually with search engines, you will often be asked for keywords to describe the page.

PC Mojo's home page is titled:
  Web Site Design, Web Hosting, Web Development with MOJO!!
        - PC Mojo - Mojo, Magic, Wizardry for all things computer! - Cave Creek, AZ

It has no header text, nor visible text on the page save for the image descriptions. So, a lot of the search engines would simply index us on the words within the title, which wouldn't get us many of the hits we are looking for.

So, even though we at PC Mojo rely most heavily on our direct contacts for our marketing program, and don't rely much on the search engines, we SHOULD practice SOME of what we preach, right? So, the home page has the following 'description' meta tag:
Web Design, Web Hosting and Web Development with MOJO for less! PC Mojo offers personalized service for a mass produced price, we'll host your web site for $15 per month! Cave Creek, AZ!

Still not a real burner as far as search engines go, but we feel it gets the DESCRIPTION we want to have across. There are a million other ways to do it, and we have indeed employed a few of the 'tricks' within our site to get some more hits, but you get the idea.

What keywords should we use? This is an important consideration for you, and you should really spend some time investigating your competition, deciding what you want to go after, and generally do NOT rush it! PC Mojo has the following keywords on our home page:
Web Design, Web Hosting, Arizona, Cold Fusion, Allaire, Dreamweaver, Virtual, Web, Hosting, Space, Presence, Provider, Rental, Domain, Account, HTML, ISP, POP, Free, Web, Hosting, Professional, Free, Design, Development, Commercial, Business, WebHosting, Domain, Presence, Provider, CGI, Script, Microsoft, FrontPage, Extension, T3, OC3, Connection, Internet, Hosting, Free, Net, Page, Site, Design, RealAudio, RealVideo, Design, logo, logo design, Cyber, Home, Page, Internet, Personal, Development, Site Design, Java, e-mail, email, accounts, low cost, graphics, PC Mojo, cave creek, arizona, az, AZ, Cave Creek

Quite a mouthful, but there's lots worse out there! Since people have been playing around with these tags a LOT lately, the search engines are fighting back with anti-spamming. So, those sites that repeat the same words countless times with no real content will now slowly ride DOWN the charts.

Try and be ethical about your keywords and descriptions. It will do you no good to lure someone to your site by using the 'sex' or 'pornography' keywords. This WILL get you hits, but not the hits you're looking for (most of you anyway). Use them ethically, tell your story truthfully, and supplement your meta tagging with other means to get hits.

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