Many say that meta tags have no effect on your placing with the search engines. Well that is nearly true except for one ” the description meta tag. Almost all search engines (including Google) do not in reality take it into account for ranking purposes ” yet ” many use it in their search results.

Google more often than not uses the description meta tag as the text to display when it exhibits your website in the search results. We find that it will use this around 70-80% of the time. The rest of the time it will select random text from your home page but usually it picks up the first 156 characters of text on the page if it does not use the description tag. Make sure your description tags are always 156 characters or less.

Microsoft Word has a great tool that will allow you to check the text length very quickly. This tool is visible on the status bar at the bottom of the page. To use it select the text you want to control the length and then double click on the word count statistics box.

The meta tags should appear in the head section of the page between the head tags.

Google is a little rascal when it comes to using or not using the meta description tag. When it does use it you can have full control of what is exposed to potential visitors but it will often switch what it uses at will with sometimes it just plucking a piece of text from your webpage.

To ensure you have more control over what Google chooses as the text in the search results as well as setting the description tag carefully also make sure that the first 156 characters of text on your page says what you would like to appear in Google.

If you have a flash site or just use images with a little text, you have a problem! We have seen Google pick up the alt text from an image and display this when it didn’t select to use our description tag. This will tell you to ALWAYS have some text on your page even if it is only 156 carefully chosen characters (including spaces).

Learn more about the available SEO Singapore and SEO trainings. Free reprint avaialable from: One Stop Meta Tag Mania.

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Hundreds of thousands of results will be displayed on searching for a popular topic on any search engine. In such a competitive scenario, Search Engine Optimization or SEO enables a firm to feature among the top search results for a query relating to a particular word. The reason for the increasing popularity of SEO in last few years is that the appearance of the website in top search results aids in getting more visitors to it, which very often converts into more business.

There are two types of SEO – white hat and black hat. The methods used in black hat SEO to push the website in the top results are not seen as fair practices. In contrast, white hat SEO follows all the rules prescribed by the search engines and concentrates on the methods which are largely approved of.

To connect a particular web page to a specific keyword, the search engines in the past utilised the Meta data of the page that has been made a part of the code of that page. But, nowadays, a huge proportion of search engines have started using complicated algorithms which assess over two hundred distinct parameters to rank search results.

SEO consultants constantly try to guess the importance of different factors that play a part in the search algorithms and stay abreast with the advancements that search engines make. This information helps them fine-tune the SEO strategies for their customers so that they remain competitive for important keywords. When the search results were only dependent on Meta data and the content of the web page, this task involved optimizing the Meta tags of the web pages and ensuring that the keyword density of every page was just appropriate.

Although these factors are still quite significant, search engines now give a lot more weight to the popularity of a web page. The popularity of a particular web page is determined by how many other pages link to it. It is almost like a democratic process as every link to the web page can be seen as a vote. Because of this, now SEO has to focus on offsite techniques as well, such as offering content for free to get inbound links and developing a presence on online hubs for social interaction, such as blogs, forums etc.

You should always remember that SEO is an ongoing and dynamic process. The field is constantly changing and your strategies have to adapt to those changes. This is what makes using the services of a professional SEO consultant so vital.

Learn more about the available SEO Singapore and SEO trainings. Also published at Fundamental Concepts Of SEO.

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Optimization entails a lot of changes to a website, it’s content, code and the generation of inbound links to it. It covers all types of navigation, internal, external and inbound. One of the more important parts of optimization is the use of boldface, italicizing etc., of the content. It’s called emphasis!

Now you may be thinking that you have used the heading, H1 tag, and that is emphasizing your important keywords. Yes, it is, and very well too, but we are talking here about regular content on the site. The actual body content of your pages.

When this subject comes up in conversations I’m always asked how to emphasize content. For the most part we use boldface or italics to show that there is more importance to these particular words. In speech we would say them louder, or with inflection, to emphasize them. On a web page we can only show something visually to add to their importance.

I know it doesn’t seem like much but I’m often amazed when I see a site rise in the ranks for a given search when I have gone through and laid emphasis out on the pages and main body content. This is one of those often overlooked opportunities to put finishing touches on an optimization campaign.

Using bold and italicizing are the two most important methods of doing this with your main body content. I have been unable to prove that any other method works. For the record though there is quoting, underlining, capitalizing that can be used as well, I just have no proof they work.

This is one part of optimization that I see overlooked on a regular basis with a lot of websites. There are many parts of SEO that are either unknown by most, or just not bothered with. I have seen good results from simply updating a site with this body content emphasis in mind. It works, is positive and is certainly an ethical method to SEO.

Robert (BK) Kelsey runs Ethical SEO Service and offers Ethical SEO Training as an affordable introduction to SEO (enough to optimize any website), as well as an Advanced SEO Training Course.

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