SEO - Meta tags, Keywords and Accessibility

Posted: July 2nd, 2009 | Author: Ryan | Filed under: SEO, XHTML | Tags: Better Coding, SEO |

In my previous post “An insight into what Search Engines like” I discussed a point on search engines liking content that does not have meta barriers.

These can include

<meta name=”ROBOTS” content=”NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW” />

<meta name=”ROBOTS” content=”NOARCHIVE” />

Some Meta data is vital for Search Engines indexing the page and building descriptions in search results.

These tags include
Description

<meta name=”description” content=”Insert your fascinating description of the page here” />

Keyword

<meta name=”keyword” content=”keyword 1, keyword 2, keyword 3, etc” />

Keywords can be singular words or phrases related to the specific page.
A general rule to consider with adding keywords is to limit the amount of keywords used, add specific targeted keywords for the type of site, its location and to make sure the content of the page has those keywords appearing often.

Keywords can be placed within other parts of the mark-up including elements used for accessibility to provide areas for keywords.
This can be done using the title attribute on a variety of tags.

a href
The title tag within the a href link allows for a description to appear in a small tool tip when hovering over a link.

<a href=”about-me.html” title=”About the Web Designer Ryan McNair”>About Ryan</a>

acronym and abbreviations
If your site includes acronyms and abbreviations within the content and uses them as keywords, this may pose problems when potential visitors may search for the non-abbreviated phrase.

A solution for this is to use

<acronym title=”Search Engine Optimisation”>SEO</a>

<abbr title=”Information”>Info</a>

Image
Instead of using the title attribute within the tag, the alt tag is used to convey the text information relevant to the keywords.

Other Meta tags you may consider adding are

Author

<meta name=”author” content=”Ryan McNair” />

Copyright

<meta name=”copyright” content=”Copyright 2009 Ryan McNair, All Rights Reserved” />

Although adding these two meta tags to the mark-up of your site will not increase your position in search engine results they do give extra information to the page

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