META DESCRIPTIONS
Meta descriptions are short descriptions of the subject matter on a web page located in the section to help the search engines understand the content. Meta tag descriptions are an additional chance to tell the search engine what the page is all about. A targeted meta description can improve a website’s visibility, and adds relevance to the page. Search engines often use the meta description as the text they display in the search results. The more relevant the description, the better the ranking the site will get for a specific keyword or phrase.
META KEYWORDS
Similar to meta descriptions, meta keywords are another meta tag recognized by the search engines. Instead of sentences, meta keywords are merely a listing of the important keywords for a page. Ideally, words and phrases listed in the meta keywords should also appear multiple times in the text content of that page.
The Meta Keywords Tag has been extremely abused by optimizers stuffing hundreds and even thousands of words into the tag, whether relevant to the text content of the page or not. Because of this, search engines do not grant this tag much weight anymore, if any, in ranking the page. However, they do still read the tag as text and it is helpful if the content of the keyword meta tag and the content on the page are closely related.
Note: If you're having a tough time choosing highly targeted and profitable keywords (not just meta keywords), I recommend a software program called Market Samurai. It's a powerful tool that can tell you how much traffic and even sales you can expect from certain keywords. I've reviewed it in more detail on my SEO Resources page.
Ask questions or post comments about Meta Tags here.
Posted on
Sun, June 20, 2010
by Christopher Nelson