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Meta tags are small tags that are included in the section of your web pages design. Some search engines use this information to know what the web page is about. When people search for keyword phrases that are in the meta tag, the search engine knows to include your site in the search results.

I am a firm believer in the "Long Tail" philosophy, especially concerning the internet. In a nutshell, the long tail philosophy involves a small amount of action from a lot of different sources. Meta tags serve this purpose when trying to get traffic to your web site.

Meta tags fell from favor with many web site designers because some of the largest search providers stopped using them as a factor in ranking web sites. Because so much emphasis was being placed on Yahoo and Google, people were not taking the time to add elements that weren't being used to get your site listed on those services. the problem with this is, there are still a lot of smaller search engine services taht still use meta tags in listing and ranking sites. While you can get a lot of traffic from the major search engines, you can also get a significant amount of traffic from smaller search engines as well. While no one small service will send as much traffic your way as a good listing on Google, you can get a small amount of traffic from each of a large number of small services. These small amounts of traffic add up, giving you a lot of traffic.

In designing meta tags you should keep your keyword phrases in mind. There are two main meta tags to concern yourself with: meta keyword and meta description.

Meta keyword should obviously contain your keyword phrases. List them with a comma separating them. Try to limit the phrases to the ones that are important to that page. If you need to add more, design a new page optimized for the other keywords.

The meta description should contain a brief description of the page. For some search engines, this is the description that's displayed when some one sees your site listed on the search page. You should try to include your keyword phrases in the description. This tells the search engine that it's an important phrase, and the engine will give that term more weight when it lists your site.

Meta tags don't help with every search engine, but they do help with some. They're free, and easy to include, so there's really no excuse for not adding them to your page. The increase in traffic is worth it.

Learn more about this author, Jim Smoot.
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