Free Marketing Tools and SEO Guide and Tips

Marketing Your Site

Proper Use of Meta Tags and resources

What are Meta tags?

They are information inserted into the "head" area of your web pages. Other than the title tag (explained below), information in the head area of your web pages is not seen by those viewing your pages in browsers. Instead, meta information in this area is used to communicate information that a human visitor may not be concerned with. Meta tags, for example, can tell a browser what "character set" to use or whether a web page has self-rated itself in terms of adult content. . Due to the competitive nature of the online casino industry, it is essential to properly utilize meta tags in order to position your website for optimal exposure.

Let's see two common types of meta tags, then we'll discuss exactly how they are used in more depth:

In the example above, you can see the beginning of the page's "head" area as noted by the HEAD tag -- it ends at the portion shown as /HEAD.

Meta tags go in between the "opening" and "closing" HEAD tags. Shown in the example is a TITLE tag, then a META DESCRIPTION tag, then a META KEYWORDS tag.

The HTML title tag isn't really a meta tag, but it's worth discussing in relation to them. Whatever text you place in the title tag (between the TITLE and /TITLE portions as shown in the example) will appear in the reverse bar of someone's browser when they view the web page.

Example meta tags for Sportsbook portal:

Be careful when creating the keyword meta tag. Search engines will most likely ignore your submission if you repeat keywords or use irrelevant keywords (i.e. 'britney spears' as a keyword for an online gaming site)

The Meta Description Tag

The meta description tag allows you to influence the description of your page in the crawlers that support the tag. Look back at the example of a meta tag. See the first meta tag shown, the one that says "name=description"? That's the meta description tag. The text you want to be shown as your description goes between the quotation marks after the "content=" portion of the tag (generally, 200 to 250 characters may be indexed, though only a smaller portion of this amount may be displayed).

The Meta Keywords Tag

The meta keywords tag allows you to provide additional text for crawler-based search engines to index along with your body copy. How does this help you? Well, for most major crawlers, it doesn't. That's because most crawlers now ignore the tag.
The meta keywords tag is sometimes useful as a way to reinforce the terms you think a page is important for ON THE FEW CRAWLERS THAT SUPPORT IT. For instance, if you had a page about stamp collecting -- AND you say the words stamp collecting at various places in your body copy -- then mentioning the words "stamp collecting" in the meta keywords tag MIGHT help boost your page a bit higher for those words.
Remember, if you don't use the words "stamp collecting" on the page at all, then just adding them to the meta keywords tag is extremely unlikely to help the page do well for the term. The text in the meta keywords tag, FOR THE FEW CRAWLERS THAT SUPPORT IT, works in conjunction with the text in your body copy.

Meta Tag Generators, Builders and Evaluators

SiteUp's Meta-Tag Generator - This is a software-based package for Windows that creates meta tags. It is a freeware package -- no registration fee required.

Meta Tag Builder This form allows you to create very complicated meta tags using much more than the keywords and description tags, if you wish. Note that it will place a commented credit line into the tag. This can easily be removed, if you wish.