| Most of the people (read “laymen”) comprehend search engine optimization as meta optimization service or adding appropriately tweaked meta tags to the web pages. The fact is that the meta tags are only a part of website optimization process. There is much more to it. Though meta optimization service has long enjoyed the rapport of one of the most important SEO practice, over the time it has become one of the most abused.
There are many SEO techniques that have earned wrath of search engine crawlers and lead the websites using them into lifelong ban. Meta optimization service is far from that league but not too far either. There are some practices of meta optimization service that may not particularly be liked by the search engine crawlers. Many people are of the opinion that meta tags are not really too much of an effort and can be written by anyone who has elementary knowledge of HTML. However, this is just a myth. Meta optimization is a serious work. The person who is writing the tags should have in-depth knowledge of SEO as well as black hat SEO so as to get the best results within the ethical limits. Moreover, the person should also have copywriting skills.
Most of the amateur web developers do one mistake that sets their work apart from that of a professional, i.e. over usage of meta tags. Now, meta optimization does not mean that you will add to many meta tags to the web page. Remember, the simpler and shorter it is, the better it is since there will be less room for mistake then. Besides the number of meta tags, the number of characters or words in each meta tag is also of concern in meta optimization . Ideally the title tag should comprise only 5 to 10 words including the company name and relevant keywords. That makes it 90 characters with spaces. The de../scription tag should be a concise and sincere summary of the webpage with not more than 170 characters with spaces. Finally the keywords tag should be simple and relevant with a maximum character count of 900 including the spaces. Remember, the key to make your meta optimization successful is to keep the tags for each page unique.
You must cautiously work with the keyword tag. Focus only on not more than three keywords that are relevant to your page and target market. Google ignores this tag and many other search engines consider it as spamdexing so be very judicious with your keywords usage here. There are many ways in which you can write the keyword tag. The keywords can be listed as separated by comma and no space, comma and space or simply no comma but space. The last option is preferable since it adds the flexibility of search engine picking up various combinations of keywords on its own.
Many meta tag writers pay little attention to the title tag. However, they forget it is their chance to create a brand image for the web page. It is very important if you want to appeal the visitors. Some of them also think that the de../scription tags are of no importance anymore since Google has stopped considering them. However, there are many search engines for which de../scription tags are very important criteria for website ranking.
For many website developers meta optimization means copying the meta tags of the competitor. They believe that by copying the top ranked competitor’s meta tags they can do as well as them. However, they forget meta optimization is just part of the whole effort there are many more factors like the website URL, web pages content, keywords & phrases optimization, site structure, link popularity, image alt tags, and many more index factors. Search engine algorithms are very dynamic. Meta optimization is just one of the techniques of the whole process of appeasing the search engine crawlers. It is neither too important to waste to much time and resources over it nor too trivial to neglect it completely.
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