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Helium" >
< META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="ALL" >
< /HEAD >

In the above code, you'll notice that you will see several tags. The first one that you should worry about is "keywords". In this tag you will include keywords that best describe your site. So if you have a site such as Helium, the keywords would be writing, articles, make money, and whatever else you want to choose. You would place this in the area that says CONTENT, and you would place it between the quotation marks like you would any other HTML code.

Next you are going to see DESCRIPTION. This is going to be the actual description of the site. For this example, I used "Write, and get paid, that is the description" as the description of the site. This is what would be displayed on the search engine results if they were to read your meta tags.

The other tags for META really aren't all that important, but I will go over them anyway. AUTHORS is really just a means of declaring the author, but I don't what utility this serves. ROBOTS, just says which spiders are allowed to view your page and which ones aren't. This of course is stupid, because I would imagine you would want all robots viewing all of your pages. Otherwise, you probably should password protect the site so that you can control who comes to it. And finally EXPIRES is just when the content on the site expires. This is a signal that a spider should be sent back to the site 25 days from now to reindex it. I always set it at 25, but I don't really have a good reason for it. I guess I just like the number. It just seemed like a realistic expectation, but I doubt the spiders even listen to this anyway.

Since there aren't very many META tags to remember, they are relatively easy to use. The problem again is just that most search engines are avoiding them and even those that do don't use the majority of information provided by them. This of course has rendered them virtually worthless in the greater scheme of things, but they are still considered an important concept in promoting your website through search engines. Out of all of the websites that I own, I personally don't use META tags, but it is really up to the webmaster whether or not they believe more traffic can be obtained in this manner. Personally I just don't think that it is likely to make that big of a difference, which is why I haven't even attempted to use it on any of my current sites. But again, this of course is a decision that should be made at the webmaster's own personal discretion.

Learn more about this author, Clacky McSnackins.
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