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Author: John Case Article source: http://www.articlealley.com/. Used with author's permission.
Similar to the "alt image" tags that are associated with graphics in a page, the importance of meta tags to search engines has declined considerably, and a surprising number of webmasters don't even bother. Is it worth your time to add meta tags? Since it is a simple process that can give you a slight advantage over sites that don't bother, the answer is yes.
You can actually check out the meta tags of any page by going to that site and choosing View> Source Code in your internet browser.
Let's look at the source code for the site http://www.easy-learn-to-earn.com/
Here are the meta tags:
Work at Home Ideas | Making Money on the Internet
Notice that the tags come in the "head" section of a page, between the and tags. Let's look at each of the tags.
-Technically, the tag is not a meta tag, but you can think of them going together. The title tag is undoubtedly the most important. As you probably know, the title displays at the top of web browsers, and also appears if you add the page to your favorites ("bookmark" the page). The title is crucial for search engine optimization, and there is no excuse for not adding a title to each and every page of your site.<p>
-The "copyright" tag is not necessary, but might dissuade someone from stealing content from your page, and makes your page look more professional.<p>
-The "description" meta tag is the second most important tag, after the title tag, as it allows you to control how your how your site is described on some, but not all search engines. Yahoo.com, for example, reads description tags, and will give the tag's content as the description of a page under the page's title in a list of search results. So you can see the "description" tag is very important, as it give web surfers information that helps them decide if they want to clink on the link or not.<p>
- The "keyword" tags were once crucial, but are now ignored by most major search engines. Keyword tags are still recognized by Inktomi and Teoma, but how important they are to these search engines is unclear. However, adding up to 5 or 6 keyword phrases that also appear in your page's main text MIGHT give you a slight edge. <p>
When adding meta tags to your site, you can simply copy and paste in the code below, changing the uppercase words to fit your site. (There is no need to use all caps in your tags, though.)<p>
<title>PAGE TITLE
Since the title and description tags are absolutely indispensable and it only takes less than a minute to add the copyright and keyword tags, meta tags are definitely worth your time.
John Case is the author of http://www.easy-learn-to-earn.com, a free guide to making an income online, and maintains an SEO site at http://www.awordsworth1000pictures.com/SEO_training/index.html
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