Contact
Subscribe
February 10, 2009 
I’ve been writing about meta tags and keywords and how frequently many of the web sites I review have them all wrong.
I suspect some of you are wondering how it is that I can see your meta tags, when you can’t?
It’s just a matter of knowing how, and it’s very easy to do.
Just right click your mouse somewhere on the main body of your web site or that of virtually any other web site and a box will appear with a set of options. If you use Firefox as a browser, one of the options will be “View Page Source”, if you use Internet Explorer it will read “View Source.” Just click on either and you will see the code that is behind the web page.
Now sometimes people will right click on a part of the web site where an image is displayed, and you will not see the “view page code”. If this happens to you, try another area on the page, usually where there is text for the body of the page. On most web sites you should be able to find the code with out too much trouble.
The meta Tags are at the top of the code, between two “head” tags. The first is <head> and then bunch of code and it ends with </head> which indicates that the Header information is done. It is almost always followed by the Body code. <body> Then all the stuff that actually appears on your page is listed. it eventually ends with a end body tag, </body>
You only need to look at the stuff on top to see if your meta tags are adequate.
There are a lot of possible Meta Tags, but of those there are two things you want to be sure to check.
You will want to be sure to check out your keywords and also your web site description. Most meta tags such as the keyword ones are optional as far as getting your site to work. But they are very important if you want the search engine bots and/or anyone else to find your site.
You should have, but are not required to have the following:
<meta name=”Keywords” content=”keywords,separated,by,commas”> In the example, I include the words keywords, separated and comma to show what the keywords should look like. There shouldn’t be spaces between the keywords, each keyword or keyword phrase should be separated by a comma.
I have found web sites with no keywords at all, and I have found web sites where the keywords are totally unrelated to the page. In the later case, someone probably “borrowed” someone else’s web site because they liked the layout and replaced all the content without bothering to fix the keywords. Look at your keywords, are they “geographically based long tail keywords” as I have been preaching? If not, you want to get them fixed.
The second element that you want to be sure is in your meta tags is:
<meta name=”Description” content=”information about your site”>
The “information about your site should be 100-150 characters long and should include your best keywords.
To learn more about meta tags, you might want to get a copy HTML in Simple Terms by Terry Jett which I have published and sell. You can find a link on my other blog site http://MicroBusinessSpecialist.com/blog or you can use the links below. It’s only $9.97 and does a good job of explaining Meta Tags on pages 16-18.
I keep a copy of it handy by my computer to look up the HTML code I need on occasion to adjust my blogs, web pages and Squidoo lens. I am a marketer, and not a computer tech, so I need HTML help from time to time. If you do as well, you might benefit by downloading a copy, printing it out and keeping it by your computer like I do.
You can always look up things online by doing a search, but I find having a printed reference to be handier and quicker.
http://askearlabout.com/html-in-simple-terms/index.html
Get a wordpress plugin while it is still completely free. 
No Comments 
Meta Tags
