4# Using Meta Tags

For those who don’t know, a meta tag is an HTML tag that is located in the
HEAD section of a web page. Unlike other HTML tags, meta tags
do not appear anywhere on the page itself, so visitors never see
them. Different meta tags serve different purposes, but they are
generally used to provide additional information about the page.

for complete description of meta tag, check this site

Some of them are useful, especially when communicating with search engine spiders.

So how can I use meta tags in my posts ? Here is a good article about it: How To Use HTML Meta Tags from searchenginewatch.com.

I have choosed to use these tags in my SEO experience:

1. META Description
2. META Keywords
3. TITLE

So lets check them one by one:

• META Description

Can be used to provide short description about your page/post. Visible to some search engine spider/robots. Example:

<meta content='SEO Progress, SEO and' name='description'/>

• META Keywords

Can be used to provide information about you page/post for search engine spiders. The bad thing is that this tag is normally ignored by most of them. So don't count too much on it, but it doesn't hurt to try. Not more that 25 words. Example:

<meta content='SEO Blog Blogger post traffic' name='keywords'/>

• TITLE tag

It's not a meta tag but it's useful in an different way. The text that you put inside of the TITLE tags ends up in your browsers title bar, and if a page with TITLE tag gets bookmarked (hoping for that !), the content of it will be used for bookmark name.

Now, the good news is that blogspot already does this autmatically for your every post. That's why I already had this in place on my third post.

You can create the description and keywords tags easily with Meta-tag generator: http://www.orblogs.com/get_meta.asp

Just go ahead and define your description and keywords and click "get tags" button. From the you can follow the instructions on how to change your blogger or wordpress template so that those tags will be included on every post.

To edit template on Blogger, login in, choose Dashboard/Layout/Edit HTML.

How to verity if your tags are working, two quick methods:

1) Go to your blog as visitor, when page is loaded click View/Page
Source (Ctrl+G) on Firefox browser menu or on Internet Explorer View/Source on browser menu. This opens an HTML view of your page. You should be able to find easily the TITLE and description and keywords tags in the resulting HTML code, look for TITLE tag first, metatags are under it..

2) Verify your blog on Metatag Analyzer, you'll get quite comperensive report: http://www.submitexpress.com/analyzer/