Summersault Blog

You’ve spent the time and money to build a website or you’ve hired someone to build it. You wait a couple of months but you only receive a couple of visitors per day tops. You start to worry that maybe you’ve wasted your time and money on something that isn’t going to yield any results. What do you do?

Search Engines are the primary way that visitors find your website. In the early days your domain name (www.domain.com) was the most important factor when trying to market a website. I remember hearing over and over that you needed to have a short domain name that people can remember or else they would never find your website. Well, times have changed and internet users and getting smarter. Rather than typing in a domain name, most users use search engines (e.g. Yahoo, Google, Dmoz, Lycos) to find the websites they’re looking for.

If you’re at all familiar with the internet, you’re familiar with the purpose of search engines. They allow you to quickly find websites, images, products and other types of information based on keyword searches. Search engines are an index for the internet. If you’re looking for a topic in a book you’ll use the index, and the same is true with the internet.

In this series, Search Engine Optimization, I’ll take you through some of the tips and guidelines you can follow to get your site to show up on the search engines when people search for keywords related to your website’s content. All of these articles will assume that you’ve listed your website with at least one search engine. If you haven’t yet done this, you’ll want to do that first.

Meta Tags

In this first issue we’ll talk about Meta Tags. It has long been the opinion of web developers that your meta tags are the most important tag in your HTML tool set when it comes to marketing your website. They are intended to provide information about your website to search engine spiders that crawl your website for placement within a search engine. In the past the information in the Keywords and Description meta tags were the only information used to index your site, so it was very important to make sure that you included all pertinent information in those tags.

Today, however, things have changed. The way in which search engines index your pages is a little different and they’ve gotten wise to the people who try to stuff their meta tags with unrelated keywords and phrases in order to drive traffic to their site. Meta tags are a little less important now than they used to be, but they are still recommended as a foundation for search engine optimization because several existing search engines still consider Meta tags when they index your website.

Let’s get started! Use the numbered links below to navigate through the pages of this article.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 7th, 2005 at 11:59 am and is filed under Website Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.