Internet Marketing Optimization | SEO Expert

Static VS Dynamic URLs

Several in the SEO world have long questioned the necessity of re-writing dynamic URLs, those that pull content from databases into static URLs that appear to end with a finite .php / .asp / .html / .cfm etc. A dynamic URL is often criticized by search engine optimizers because of the difficulties search engines have had indexing and reading them in the past.

At this time, however, Yahoo!, Bing, Google & Teoma all have dynamic pages in their index and in the top search engine result pages for many different searches. It would seem the issue with search engines has degraded. However, the usability matter of dynamic URLs still exists. From a user’s point of view a URL in the form of http://www.site.com/page.html is considerably friendlier than a URL written as http://www.site.com/page.php?ID=2&TAGformat=945bb399ls3.

No matter if it’s posting the URL to a website, sending it in an email, or save it on a notepad for later, the dynamic URL is something that is definitely unfriendly for users. The advantages of mod_rewrite and other tools that permit for the conversion of dynamic URLs into static ones may be lessened by the new abilities of the search engines, but they are not altogether gone.

My Personal Opinion – 90% of the Rankings Equation Lies in These 4 Factors

I think that sometimes, we in the field of search marketing try to make the concept of ranking more difficult than it really is. True – there are hundreds of ways to build a link, an infinite number of keywords, thousands of unique sources to drive traffic along with analytics, design, usability, code structure, conversion testing, etc. However, when it comes to the very specific question of how to rank well for a particular keyword in standard organic results at the engines, you’re really only talking about a few big key components.

#1 – Keyword Usage & Content Relevance

While I don’t believe in keyword density (reference: nonsense), there’s no doubt that using your keywords intelligently and creating a page that is actually relevant to the query and searcher intent is critical to ranking well. My general best practice is to use the primary keyword phrase as follows:

• In the title tag once, and possibly twice (or as a variation) if it makes sense and sounds good (subjective, but necessary)
• Once in the H1 header tag of the page
• At least 3X in the body copy on the page (sometimes a few more times if there’s a lot of text content)
• At least once in bold
• At least once in the alt tag of an image
• Once in the URL
• At least once (sometimes 2X when it makes sense) in the meta description tag
• Generally not in link anchor text on the page itself (this is a bit more complex – see this post for details)

For those who’ve done the nonsense words testing to see how the engines respond, you know that you can certainly get some extra value out of going wild and stuffing the keywords all over the page, but we’ve also seen that once you reach about this level of saturation I’ve described above, you’re getting about 95% of the value you can get, and even the tiniest amount of extra link juice can make a page like this outrank a “super-stuffed” page (usually).

#2 – Raw Link Juice

Some people call this PageRank or link weight or link power – basically it refers to the raw quantity of global link popularity ascribed to the page. You can grow this with internal links (from your own site) and external links (from other sites). A page with a phenomenal amount of global link power, even if the sources aren’t particularly relevant and the keywords are barely used, can still rank remarkably well in Google & Yahoo! (MSN & Ask are both a bit more keyword & subject focused from what we’ve seen).

Link juice operates on the basic principle that was used in the early PageRank formula – that pages on the web have some (low) inherent level of importance and that the link structure of the web could help to point out pages with greater and lesser value. Those pages that were linked to by many thousands of pages were very important and thus, when they linked to other pages, those pages must, by extension, also have great importance.

Carrying this theory back to your own pages, you can see how raw link juice will have a large impact on how the search engines score their rankings. Growing global link popularity requires both link building (so your site has enough link juice) and intelligent internal link structure (to ensure that you’re flowing that juice to the right places).

#3 – Anchor Text Weight

As the search engines evolved in the early 2000′s, they picked up on the usage of anchor text and found that by weighting the keywords and phrases pages used to link, they could get an even better idea of what pages would be about and which were most relevant to particular subjects. The anchor text of links is now a critical part of the ranking equation, and when seen in great quantity, it can overshadow many other ranking factors – you can see plenty of web pages that are weaker in all the other three factors I describe here ranking primarily because they’ve earned (or, oftentimes for commercial terms, bought) many hundreds or thousands of links with the precise anchor text of the phrase they’re targeting.

Note that anchor text comes from both internal and external links, so if you’re trying to optimize, it’s wise to think about how you’re linking to material from your own pages – using generic links or image links may cost you some of the ranking power you’d otherwise earn by having internal links with accurate, relevant anchor text. However, you can go overboard here, so be cautious – and note that 100,000 internal pages linking with anchor text doesn’t provide the same value as 100,000 external links with that text.

#4 – Domain Authority

This is the most complex of the factors I describe in this post. Basically, domain trust refers to a variety of signals about a site that the search engines use to determine legitimacy. Does the domain have a history in the engine? Do lots of people search for and use the domain? Does the domain have high quality links pointing to it from other trustworthy sources? Does the domain link out primarily to other trusted sites? Do analytics and registration information and temporal link growth fit with expected patterns?

To influence this variable positively, all you really need to do is operate your site in a manner consistent with the engines’ guidelines. If you want to earn a lot of trust early on in a domain’s life, get lots of sites that the engines already trust to link to you. And if you’re looking to spoil that trust, link out to bad neighborhoods, use manipulative link growth practices that don’t match up to queries or traffic patterns and play the churn & burn game.

As a wrap up, I’d love to hear your opinions on these four factors and whether you think there should be 5, 3 or 20 instead.

p.s. Remember that this post is my personal opinion only! Sure – I’m basing it on my experience, which is relatively robust, but I don’t doubt that others have there have very different conceptions of what comprises the bulk of the rankings equation, so please use your own judgment.

Making the Most of Meta Description Tags

Back to basics time this Friday, and this time, it’s all about the only meta tag that still has relevance; the meta description tag. Meta descriptions have three primary uses:

1. To describe the content of the page accurately and succinctly
2. To serve as a short, text “advertisement” to click on your results in the search results
3. To display targeted keywords, not for ranking purposes, but to indicate the content to searchers

Great meta descriptions, just like great ads, can be tough to write, but for keyword-targeted pages, particularly in competitive search results, they’re a critical part of driving traffic from the engines through to your pages. Their importance is much greater for search terms where the intent of the searcher is unclear or different searchers might have different motivations.

There’s a few good rules to follow when writing meta descriptions that take advantage of their use in pulling in search traffic:

1. Always describe your content honestly – if it’s not as “sexy” as you’d like, spice up your content, don’t bait and switch on searchers or they’ll have a poor brand association.
2. Character limits – currently Google displays up to 160 characters, Yahoo! up to 165 and MSN up to 200+ (they’ll go to three vertical lines in some cases). Stick with the smallest – Google – and keep those descriptions at 160 characters (including spaces) or less.
3. Write with as much sizzle as you can while staying descriptive – the perfect meta description is like the perfect ad – compelling and informative.
4. Just like an ad, you can test meta description performance in the search results, but it takes careful attention. You’ll need to buy the keyword through PPC so you know how many impressions it received over a given timeframe and can track your CTR.
5. Unlike an ad, the motivation for natural search click is frequently very different than that of users clicking on the paid results. Don’t assume that a successful PPC ad will transition into a good meta description (or the reverse).
6. It’s extremely important to have your keywords in the meta tag – the bolding done by the engines can make a big difference in visibility and CTR.
7. You shouldn’t always write a meta description. Although conventional logic would hold that it’s universally wiser to write a good meta description yourself, rather than let the engines scrape your page, this isn’t the case. I use the general rule that if the page is targeting 1-3 heavily-searched terms/phrases, go with a meta description that hits those users performing that search. However, if you’re targeting longer tail traffic, for example with hundreds of articles or blog entries or even a huge product catalog, it can sometimes be wiser to let the engines themselves extract the relevant text. The reason is simple – when engines pull, they always display the keywords (and surrounding phrases) that the user searched for. If you force a meta description, you can detract from the relevance the engines make naturally. In some cases, they’ll overrule your meta description anyway, but it’s not always wise to rely on that.

So, we’ve now completed the triumvirate of on-page basics with title tags, meta descriptions and URLs. If you’ve got some valuable meta description writing techniques, please do share.

11 Best Practices for URLs

I could have sworn that someone has already a great post or forum thread on this topic, but I can’t seem to find it (no matter how advanced my operators). I’m sure Mr. Malicoat has it in his bookmarks, but since blog posts are one of my personal systems for public bookmarking, here goes.

Eleven Guidelines to Successful URLs

1. Describe Your Content
   An obvious URL is a great URL. If a user can look at the Address bar (or a pasted link) and make an accurate guess about the content of the page before ever reaching it, you’ve done your job. These URLs get pasted, shared, emailed, written down, and yes, even recognized by the engines.
2. Keep it Short
   Remember always; brevity is a virtue. The shorter the URL, the easier to copy & paste, read over the phone, write on a business card, or use in a hundred other unorthodox fashions, all of which spell better usability & increased branding.
3. Static is the Way & the Light
   Not to bring religion into this, but I can tell you with certainty that some of the engines absolutely DO treat static URLs differently than dynamic ones. And no human likes a URL where the big players are “?,” “&,” and “=.”
4. Descriptives are Better than Numbers
   If you’re thinking of using 114/cat223/, go with /brand/adidas/ instead. Even if the descriptive isn’t a keyword or particularly informative to an uninitiated user, it’s far better to use words when possible. If nothing else, your team members will thank you for making it that much easier to ID problems in development and testing.
5. Keywords Never Hurt
   If you know that you’re going to be targeting a lot of competitive keyword phrases on your website for search traffic, you’ll want every advantage you can get. Keywords are certainly one element of that strategy, so take the list from marketing, map it to the proper pages, and get to work. For dynamically created pages through a CMS, create the option of including keywords in the URL.
6. Subdomains Aren’t the Answer
   First off, never use multiple subdomains (e.g., siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com) – it’s unnecessarily complex and lengthy. Secondly, consider that subdomains have the potential to be treated separately from the primary domain when it comes to passing link and trust value. In most cases where just a few subdomains are used and there’s good interlinking, it won’t hurt, but I wouldn’t take the chance. To me, the benefits derived from reputation management (by flooding the SERPs with your subdomains) are minimal compared to the potential loss of link/trust juice. I also think that subdomain takeovers of SERPs is not something the search engines see as beneficial to their users and may shut down at any point. Luckily, if you’re doing it now, you can always 301 to the main domain.
7. Fewer Folders
   A URL should contain no unnecessary folders (or words or characters for that matter), for the same reason that a man’s pants should contain no unnecessary pleats. The extra fabric is useless and will reduce his likelihood of impressing potential mates.
8. Hyphens Separate Best
   When creating URLs with multiple words in the format of a phrase, hyphens are best to separate the terms (e.g. /brands/dolce-and-gabbana/), followed (in order) by, underscores (_), pluses (+) and nothing.
9. Stick with Conventions
   If your site uses a single format throughout, don’t consider making one section unique. Stick to your URL guidelines once established, so users (and future developers) will have a clear idea of how content is organized into folders and pages. This can apply globally as well for sites that share platforms, brands, etc. Re-inventing the wheel in situations where reliance on convention makes everyone’s tasks easier is folly.
10. Don’t be Case Sensitive
    Since URLs can accept both uppercase and lowercase characters, don’t ever, ever allow any uppercase letters in your structure. If you have them now, 301 them to all-lowercase versions to help avoid confusion. If you have a lot of type-in traffic, you might even consider a 301 rule that sends any incorrect capitalization permutation to its rightful home.
11. Don’t Append Extraneous Data
    There’s no point to having a URL exist in which removing characters generates the same content. You can be virtually assured that people on the web will figure it out, link to you in different fashions, confuse themselves, their readers and the search engines (with duplicate content issues), and then complain about it.

Example Time
The following are some grievously heinous violators of the guidelines above:

• http://www.target.com/gp/detail.html/602-9912342-3046240?_encoding=UTF8&frombrowse=1&asin=B000FN0KWA

Target (who’s powered by Amazon) doesn’t describe their content, use keywords, or keep it short. That and the horrifyingly useless data that can be removed from the URL without changing the content make this URL downright ugly.

• http://etsy.com/view_item.php?listing_id=477443&pic_id=2

Despite being one of my favorite sites, Etsy’s URLs provide no descriptive information, use multiple dynamic parameters and separate breaks with underscores.

• http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=98115&ie=UTF8&z=12&om=1&iwloc=A

Google should be ashamed – their guidelines for URLs practically set the town for the recommendations, but their maps feature is almost unusable due to inefficient, bloated URLs (when they must know that millions want to copy those URLs into emails)

These few below are doing a considerably better job, but could still go the extra mile:

• http://men.style.com/news/gadgets/092006

It’s almost there, and one could almost argue that the subdomain use here is justified for branding purposes. It is too bad they gave us so much data, but then cut out keywords and descriptives right at the end

• http://www.nasa.gov/home/index.html?skipIntro=1

Nasa has uselessly appended dynamic parameters onto the page, and added /home/index.html for no logical reason

• http://www.newyorkmetro.com/fashion/fashionshows/2007/spring/ main/newyork/womenrunway/marcjacobs/

They’re trying to be descriptive, which is great, but not separating words and going 7 folders deep is really pushing it.

These last examples have done nearly everything right:

• http://www.wahidqazi.com/seo-help/

Brilliant – it’s short, descriptive, static and obvious.

• http://blog.wahidqazi.com/11-best-practices-for-urls/

Despite the subdomain, everything else is near perfect.

• http://www.whitehouse.gov/history/presidents/jk35.html

I’m letting the White House off the hook for not using “john-kennedy” as the page title, because they’ve wisely also provided his number (the US’ 35th President).

URLs seem like one of the most simplistic parts of SEO, but I find myself returning to this issue with nearly every client. Hopefully these guidelines can help a few folks make use of best practices before it becomes an issue down the road.

Revenge of the Meta-Tag!

Many people in SEO groan at the thought of meta-tags.

After all, meta-tags for ranking is dead for SEO, isn’t it?

Not quite.

In fact, meta-tags have begun a startling revival.

A couple of key points about why you should consider taking meta-tags more seriously:

1. Google duplicate content filters

Google has had real problems this year in determining what may or may not be duplicate content.

Sites with generic, or absence of, meta-description tags, may find themselves going supplemental, or simply not showing properly for their content.

Heck, even well-known sites such as SEOmoz and Threadwatch may have issues here.

Going supplemental is an invitation to traffic loss, so take pre-emptive action by setting up unique meta-description tags on your pages.

2. Clickthrough rates

There’s no point ranking for good keywords if the description under your search engine listing sucks.

Absense of a meta-description at best leaves search engines looking for a random sampling of text that may be relevant.

Why leave it to chance?

Increase your clickthrough rates from listings by actually better controlling the text with the listing by setting up unique meta-descriptions tags for your pages.

And try to ensure you include a marketing hook very quickly in the description tag.

If you are ranking, tell search engine users why your page is so relevant for their query.

3. Ranking

Google doesn’t appear to use meta-keywords to rank webpages/sites.

But Yahoo! does.

Yahoo! still commands a respectable 30% of US search traffic, and even where the market share is really small (such as the UK), strong Yahoo! rankings can still prove very cost-effective.

So add some spice for Yahoo! Search by focusing on your meta-keywords tag.

No, I’m not advising you keyword stuff the tag – but at least make the effort to set up keywords in your tag that Yahoo! can process that for ranking purposes.

Overall

All too often people can get fixated on the details rather than the bigger picture. Decent meta-tags are a part of that bigger picture.

This is especially when it comes to clickthrough rates. After all, what’s the point of ranking for competitive keywords if you leave clickthroughs to chance?

Search engine users want a quality experience – offer them that by taking care of the details of your site that can help work best in the big picture.

How Well Your Website Can Communicate with Search Engines?

Search engines don’t talk with websites directly, they use bots to communicate with websites, their bots come to websites and start reading the websites, whatever they read at websites they go back to search engines carrying the messages and store those messages in search engine’s database.

Search Engines are NOT Human Beings!

Search engines view websites with different prospects. They don’t have eyes to analyze beautiful colors and animations, don’t have ears to listen music and don’t have feelings to fall in love with your catchy slogans. Apart of all these disabilities they can evaluate your website better than a human being.

When you develop or going to get your website developed, what things you should keep in mind? Being website Owner you might think of website design and content, being Webmaster you might think of easy navigation and flexibility of website. You might be missing one very important aspects of search engine positioning, and that is how search engine is viewing your website?

What Things Search Engines Like at Your Website?

Good communication can increase the performance, it applies the same to search engines, if your website can communicate well enough to create good impression to search engines, your website will be facilitating with high rankings then, here is a list of elements search engines like.

• Validated and Optimize Code
• Rich Content
• Unique URL of Each Webpage
• Plain URLs
• Proper Internal Linking
• Healthy Incoming Links
• Text Based Navigation
• Neat Table Structure
• Good Directory and File Structure
• Proper Headings, Subheadings, Captions
• Title, Meta Tags and Alt Tags
• Robots.txt

What Things Search Engines Dislike at Your Website?

Take care of the elements which can hurt your view to search engines, thought each search engine has its own criteria of viewing websites but all major search engines dislike these mentioned elements.

• Broken Links
• Invalid Code
• JavaScript
• Orphan Links, Images and Files
• Under-construction Page/es
• Pop ups
• Redirectors
• IP Tracking
• Dynamically Generated Pages
• Frames
• Same Background and Font Colors
• Multi Nested Table Structure

Search engine bots crawl website with different time frame period, it depends upon how frequently your website updates? Each search engine has its own time frequency to crawl websites, now you know what things do matter to search engines, take care of them so that your website can delivery its message well enough to get top rankings.

Best of luck

About The Author

Wahid Qazi is a Researcher, SEO, Trainer, Speaker and Author, specializes in google optimization and promotion.

Three Basic Elements of Search Engine Optimization SEO! Code, Content and Linking (CCL)!

Search engine optimization effort can be categorized into three basic elements “Code, Content and Linking (CCL)” these three diverse elements play very important role in search engine rankings, you will come to know about their effectiveness and usability with some of the very useful tips in this article.

Code

Code of the website is the very first element that is unfortunately ignored by most SEOs, website code allows search engines bots to go through the webpage, and if bots will not be able to understand code they will not be able to access content of the webpage because content is kept within code, this is enough to tell you about the importance of website code.

Code of the website has to be clean and optimized, here i means that code like JavaScripts or CSS should be called externally, try to keep your code as short as possible and ignore too much nesting.

You must validated complete website code either everything is working fine or not, check for browser compatibility, orphan pages and broken links, don’t forget to have robots.txt and sitemap.

Content

Content is still king, no one can deny the fact that since the revolution of search engine in mid 90s, content is undefeated king. Content needs special treatment, today search engines automatically take keywords within content, they become more conscious about content, they follow basic fundamentals of writing techniques, such as headings, sub-headings, bullets & numbered, inverted commas.

Now it’s up to you either you are successfully able to give an impression of your important keywords to search engines, try to use your important keywords in headings, sub-headings and try to start paragraphs with important keywords.

Note: – Here content means selectable content, content on images can’t be selected and read by search engine bots.

Linking

Linking is one of the most important criteria to get better rankings in search engines specially in google. Linking is divided into two categories onsite linking and offsite linking. Onsite linking belongs to links that are mentioned at your web-domain either they are internal or external it doesn’t matter, they have to be declare at your website (domain). Offsite linking belongs to links that point your web-domain from a different web-domain, they are inbound or incoming links to your website (domain).

In internal linking you should try to keep web pages as close as possible to root, if you have a big site of over 100 pages or 500 pages then you have to make relevant directories and keep relevant pages in them.

In link-building you have to keep few things in mind that link has to be one way, and link title and description should be very focus, try to have incoming links from relevant sites, since one relevant link is equal to 100 irrelevant links, when submitting to directories, go as deep as possible and try to find most relevant category where you can submit your site.

How to Optimize Dynamic Websites for Better Search Engine Rankings

There is a misconception related to dynamic websites that dynamic websites are not search engine friendly or they can’t have good positions in major search engines. This is absolutely wrong, dynamic websites can have better and more controlled positions in search engines comparatively than static websites.

What is a dynamic website?

A dynamic website is database driven website in which parts of the content are generated by Server Side Programs/ Middle Tier.
Dynamic webpage doesn’t physically exist as a file/document on (hosting) server, unless the request comes for a webpage. The request contains parameters, user identities, date & time, context etc.

Problems with Dynamic Websites according to Search Engines

This is true that search engines are not good at reading dynamic web pages, but there is always a solution for any problem, first you need to understand that why search engines are unable to read dynamically generated websites? What hurts them not to read dynamic web pages?

1. Dynamic webpage doesn’t physically exit on server
2. Dynamic website has complex URLs such as “ http://www.wahidqazi.com?name=value&blabla%blabla@session_id@2226897&blabla=77
3. Search engine bots/crawlers usually have difficulty in reading these characters “?”, “=”, “@”, “%”, “$”, “*”, “&”, “!” in URLs
4. Search engine usually considers dynamic website as group of never ending links
5. Search engine bots/crawlers might get stuck in an infinite loop, specially if the dynamic webpage has session id

Tips to Optimize Dynamic Websites

Now you know what hurts search engine bots/crawlers to index your website? What you need to know is that how you can keep your valuable website indexed by search engines, the more your web pages are indexed the better your website will impress search engines

1. Create an HTML sitemap with 100 text links or less. If you have more than 100 links, break the sitemap into more than one web pages
2. Google Sitemap will also be an advantage, specially if your website is big and dynamic
3. Get inbound links deep into your website from other relevant websites such as directories, classified directories, vertical industrial portals
4. Convert dynamic web pages into static web pages with the help of URL re-writing techniques
5. You can use some plug-in applications that will change your existing dynamic URLs into static ones, specially for shopping carts there are plenty of applications available
6. Avoid using session IDs in the URL, specially when user has not logged in
7. If you do need to include parameters, limit it to two and limit the number of characters per parameter to ten or less
8. If you do have small dynamic website and enough time you can apply this technique. Just right click on page by page of you website, copy the source code and create new static page with .htm or .html extensions

URL Rewriting Techniques and Tools

A rewrite engine is a piece of web server software application that is used to modify URLs before fetching the requested items for a variety of purposes.

Rewrite Engine for Apache HTTP server:

Apache HTTP server has a rewrite engine called mod_rewrite, which has been described as “the Swiss Army knife of URL manipulation”

Rewrite engines for Microsoft’s Internet Information Server (IIS):

1. IISRewrite from Qwerksoft
2. ISAPI_Rewrite from isapirewrite.com
3. URL Replacer from Motobit
4. Ionic’s ISAPI Rewrite Filter (IIRF) (open source) from Ionic Shade

Rewrite HttpModule for Microsoft ASP.NET:

1. URLRewriting.NET

Rewrite engine for Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) Servlet container servers:

1. Apache Tomcat, Resin, Orion etc)
2. HttpRedirectFilter (open source)
3. UrlRewriteFilter (open source) – allows you to rewrite URLs before they get to your Servlets, JSP’s, Struts etc
4. URL Rewriter (open source – LGPL) – URL Rewriter is a tool for rewriting URLs in Java Servlets. It is similar to mod_rewrite

Conclusion:

Dynamic websites are not impossible to optimize, it’s just a small fine tune that you need to keep in mind when developing a dynamic website, if you can understand the problems search engine bots/ crawlers have to face when crawling your website, you can better prepare your website, so that search engine bots/crawlers can easily index your valuable website.

How to Write Effective Title Tags for Better Positioning

Title tag is the most important part of your web page, which is normally neglected by most webmasters and designers, in fact there are few SEOs who think optimizing “Title Tag” is worthless. Title tag plays very important role in page optimization and in this article you’ll learn how to optimize it.

What Is The Title Tag?

It’s an HTML tag use as a title or heading of the web page, it shows input text on the blue bar at the web page, it is declared at the beginning of the webpage under head tag.

Example: <title>Your Home Page Title</title>

Why Is The Title Tag Important?

Title tag is the most important tag, almost all search engines evaluate webpage with title tag and check the relevancy with other elements of the page as well, and search engines also present results of a search by displaying webpage titles as links in the first line of each query result.

Tips To Write Effective Page Title:

• Try to place your most important keyword phrase at the beginning of the tag
• Use your primary keyword phrase in the title tag at least once
• Avoid using the same words multiple times
• Use plural form of keyword phrase, specially which includes complete singular word in it (Example: manufacturers)
• Use sentence case for keyword phrase but keep preposition in lower case
• Keep your title tag’s limit under 70 to 90 characters, longer sentences won’t give any value but they can be hurdle in deep crawl of your web page
• Avoid using special characters such as ! @ # $ ^ & * ( }[ | ? /
• Avoid using stopping words such as or, and , with, for, by, etc
• Use unique title tag for each page, since each page has unique content
• Make your title interesting and “compelling” to the reader to convince them why they should click there

How to Write Effective META Description Tag for Better Positioning in Yahoo and Msn

Description tag is another useful meta tag which takes prominent place at your web site’s header. There are SEOs who think that there is no worth using this meta tag, but majority of them still agree that this meta tag helps in optimizing websites for Yahoo and Msn, in this article you’ll learn how to effectively utilize it.

What Is The Meta Description Tag?

It’s an HTML tag use to feed description to search engines, it gives description of webpage to search engines, it is declared after title tag of the webpage under head tag.

Example: <meta name=”description” content=“Your Home Page Description”>

Why Is The Description Tag Important?

Description tag is the very important tag, search engines take webpage description through this tag, though search engines don’t give any importance to this tag in their ranking algorithms but this tag can lead searchers to motivate and visit your website.

Tips To Write Effective Page Description Tag:

• Describe your complete webpage in one single line or in a small paragraph
• Forget about keywords, focus on “call to action” words with respect to page relevancy
• Avoid covering complete website in one paragraph, try to focus on page
• Use unique description tag for each page, since each page has unique content
• Keep your description tag’s limit under 160 to 250 characters, longer sentences won’t give any value but they can be hurdle in deep crawl of your web page
• Avoid using special characters such as ! @ # $ ^ & * ( }[ | ? /
• Avoid all capital letter, try to use sentence case
• Use motivational lines so that your listing will be clicked comparatively better than your competitors
• Don’t misguide search engine visitors, write what is available there at the page