Making The Most of SEO With Head Tags
| Posted by: Suzanne James |
Infoseek and AltaVista were the first major crawler based search engines to support Meta keywords Tag in 1996. Inktomi and Lycos too followed thereafter.
The whole objective of SEO is to tell the search engines which websites need to be placed on the top of the Search Engine Rank Positions (SERPs). Many Do-It-Yourself SEO webmasters spend months trying to reach the top of the SERPs, only to ruin their chances before googlebot finishes reading the <head> section of the website.
There are several heading codes that make it easier for webmasters to cod their page. One is the Base code. It makes googlebot see that the website has one definite URL. This can reduce the problems associated with duplicate content. Google will read the URL in the code, whether it has the www or not. Any other version will not be considered valuable. Some SEO have claimed that this code also helps prevent illegal 302 hijacks of a website as the search engine bots see this page as the original copy.
This Heading code is made so that links can be shortened. However, It might help set the absolute URL of the page, telling the search engine bots that this is the original page. This may help prevent hijackers from using broken links, or taking the www out of the link, to bring down the Page Rank of your website.
The above code will not protect you if someone puts your name or URL in their HEAD code.
Note: Google reads 90 Characters. MSN reads 80.
Location
A website in London England does not need traffic from New York. They also want to rank high for searches in their local markets. There is a meta tag for this. However, do not make this too specific.
Extra Description
If you would like to create another description tag, that is for search engines only, then use the Abstract. This is a one line summary of the webpage – not the entire web site. These headings can make the difference between high Search Engine Results Placement (SERPS) or always being behind the competition.
