The Importance of MetaTags for Your Website
By Jonathan Peters

If you're looking for the best rankings for your website and looking for a quick way to get a boost, then metatags are not for you. Their role in search engine optimization is often times misunderstood by members of the webmaster community. They think SEO is all about picking and stuffing keywords. Well, I'm here to tell you it isn't and try to explain what they actually are good for.

Meta tags never have been a surefire way to gain that top ranking on the search engine results pages. Instead, their most valuable feature is the ability to influence to some degree how their web pages are described by the search engines. They also give you the ability to prevent certain pages from being indexed at all.

Here are some of the main metatags you need to pay attention to with a brief description of what each does:

• Title Tag - Your website's title tag is the single most important "on page" element for search engine optimization. It essentially tells the search engines what your page is all about. During the initial design of your website, make a decision on the best keywords for each of the pages. On each page, Use the most important keywords as your title tag. There are some search engine optimization services which recommend keeping your title tag to 70 characters or less but most will agree that longer title tags are probably not harmful. The extra characters are usually ignored by the search engine spiders.
• Keywords Metatag - You really should apply a keywords metatag. Don't put much time into thinking about one or stressing over it. Use the top three or four keywords you targeted your page for, and place them in the keywords tag. There are a dozen or so of other factors of your website which are more important. Focus more on its design and implementation of your page that these tags.
• Robots Metatag - The use of robot metatags is a relatively new technique. Originally started by Google, now they are used by all the search engines. These tags are designed to tell the search engine spiders when you do or do not want them to index a webpage. It also allows you to tell the spiders when you do not want the search engine to look at or evaluate any links on your page. You have the ability to specify what you want the search engines to see in other words. Keep in mind that not every search engine will obey these at this point of the search engine optimization game.
• Description Metatags - These tags are usually only see limited use from search engines. Very similar to a keywords tag, description tags are not generally user visible. They are somewhat useless for search engine marketing purposes since the search engines normally do not consider the content of these for their page ranking purposes. However, they do use description metatags as the description of your page for their search results pages. That's why you always need to make sure that you have a good description tags for all of your pages. The description should be written well enough that it will attract a potential user to click on the link to your site instead someone else's. Don't bother stuffing it with keywords since they are not used for ranking purposes. Instead, write something convincing telling the user why your pages are better than another website and the benefit from doing so.
• NoODP Metatag - This somewhat new Metatag allows you to tell search engines like MSN and Google that you don't want them use their Open Directory Project description for as the search engine results pages. You need to use this because many site descriptions in ODP are normally out of date. The ODP is an all volunteer organization, and sometimes the editors are inactive for a period of time.

Other than the important title tag, information in the head area of your web pages can't be seen by users reading in browsers. Instead, this meta-information should only be used to communicate vital information how the search engines see your site and not anything a human visitor be concerned with.

Anyone who owns a web site will tell you that a good looking, user friendly website is only the just first step towards owning a profitable one. This is where the experienced Scranton website designers, MysticLiquid come in. Visit them at www.mysticliquid.com.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Jonathan_Peters
http://EzineArticles.com/?The-Importance-of-MetaTags-for-Your-Website&id=837217