How Meta Tags Work

The Meta tags are important to getting good rankings, and on many search engines, the page title (often truncated) and the Meta Description tag are what gets displayed. Meta tags are the D.N.A. of a web page.

Meta tags go in the HEAD section of the HTML page (the same section as the TITLE tag). The Meta Description tag should contain a short description of the web-page. Guess what? You've already written one for the TITLE tag! So just edit that to make it totally human readable (and perhaps a little shorter), and you're done. The format of a Meta description tag is simple. It looks like this:

META name="description" content="whatever you want to place here"

So, in our example, we might use:

META name="description" content="Real Estate in Wilmington, North Carolina - Buying, Selling & Renting of Houses, Homes, Apartments, Commercial Property and Office Space"

My advice on the length of this description is keep it between 100 and 200 characters.

The other Meta tag is the Meta Keywords tag. What you do is take your keyphrases, and enter them in the order you think is most appropriate, separated by commas. Don't repeat a keyphrase, and don't repeat any individual word more than 5 times or so. This may mean that you can't use some of your better keyphrases.

The reason why you don't want to repeat any particular word more than 5 times is that some search engines may penalize you for doing this. It isn't likely that this will happen if you exceed 5, but play it safe. The exception is common "noise" words like "the", "in", "a", "and" and so on. Most search engines ignore them. I'd leave them in just in case, but don't worry if you have more than 5 of any of them.

If you want to get really fancy, play the cunning comma trick. The reason you have commas in keyword meta tags is that some search engines use them; they consider the actual phrases as important in your ranking. Most search engines don't however; they just look at the words, and a comma is the same as a space to them. But even so, the fact that words are next to each other means something to them. So if you can put two keyphrases together with a comma between them, and the last words of the first keyphrase coupled with the first words of the next keyphrase make up one of your keyphrases, then you've gotten 3 keyphrases for the price of two! Normally, however, this is difficult, so don't waste too much time over it.

Keep your keywords meta-tag length between 200 and 500 characters. Unfortunately, this means you may not be able to include all of your key phrases in your meta keywords tag. To deal with this, the trick is to remember that you can put different keyphrases on different pages on your site. So what you do is make your home page have general keyphrases, and then create different sets of meta keywords tags for your other pages that exclusively target more specific topics (such as "selling a home"; and the same goes for the titles and descriptions on those pages as well!). After doing that pruning, our sample keywords tag might look like this:

META name="keywords" content="real estate in wilmington north carolina,buying real estate in wilmington north carolina,selling real estate in wilmington north carolina,renting real estate in wilmington north carolina,real estate broker in wilmington north carolina,buying a house in new hanover county,buying a home in new hanover county,selling a house in new hanover county,renting a house in new hanover county,renting an apartment in new hanover county,house broker,apartment broker,home sales,apartment rental"

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