A few questions about Meta Tags.

[PeterW]

I have basic understanding of meta tags and search engine spiders but could someone please explain the following about the meta tag function in Actinic:

Should I have meta tags and description on all sections/products or just my front page?

On other threads it is usually recommended not to repeat words, does this mean over the whole site or only in the individual sections/products. What happens if you do repeat?

Do the robots pick up on individual words or phrases, ie am I better to just put in words such as funny, tshirt, teeshirts, tee, etc or phrases such as funny tshirt, cheap tshirt. I take it that this is repeating words?

I have also read about creating a robots file (I take it this is from the froogle feed option), do I need this for my site? or is it just to submit to the search engines?

Simple answers please as I am still on a learning curve

Many thanks

Peter W

[retekdirect]

A few guidelines:

Don't repeat any words or phrases in your keywords any more than 3 times. If you repeat several times, this is classed as spamming by some services and can get you blacklisted / removed.

Use phrases that are meaningful and that people are likely to use when searching, eg "funny tshirts, humourous tshirts".

Include misspeligns of several search terms, especially common typos.

Use relevant keywords on all pages if you wan them to be searchable. Include descriptive words for the products on any given page. Treat each page as seperate.

You might find this useful: http://www.google.com/webmasters/


Ryan

[PeterW]

Thank you Ryan

I will read the Google info.

[pinbrook]

you need a unique <TITLE> and meta description on every page.

The title and description should describe the contents of the page

[BPJSURF]

I was tripped up by some of the terminology in your post but hopefully the information here will help you.
When working on Meta tags and using Actinic, you should first understand that the value of "meta tags" has been diluted because of the excessive abuses of webmasters. So most search engines "crawlers" or spiders are giving less value to Meta tags in a page. A good internet marketing strategy is to develop a list of “keyword phrases" NOT meta keywords. The difference being that you with use your specific keyword phrases in several elements of a page. The most important elements are
HTML page title tag
Html heading tag <h1,h2,h3,h4>
Meta description
Meta keywords

I always recommend using the keyword phrases in your Actinic breadcrumb (Netquotvar:Parentsectiontop) and make this a h1 tag
IF you set up your catalog with a section with single product per section (as here: http://soccerpro.com) then use a separate Meta keyword phrase and description in each section. I have found the thumbnail section with single product per page to be the most effective method for gaining top results on specific products in search engines and it also is very easy to browse a website for product.

The best way to identify the most marketing productive keywords is to run test pay-per-click campaigns. Read our web blog article for information http://suresolutionsinc.com/blog/arc...imization.html

The website will truly be a traffic generator when you focus your /index.html page to deliver content specific to less the five keyword phrases. A properly constructed index.html page with less then five keywords in the met tag, a well written meta description and a well written page title accompanied by keyword phrases in the headings tags and content (TEXT) which is relevant to the five keyword phrases is the perfect mix to develop a sound traffic generating strategy. Don’t forget to validate the page.

Now on to robots file. I have to assume your mixing up "crawlers" that are search engines that crawl links to spider the web and build their index and the use of "Robots.txt" file which is a file that tells crawlers how to behave when crawling the site. Here is a quality link to instructions on creating a robots.txt file: http://www.searchengineworld.com/rob...s_tutorial.htm
IF you don’t have a robots.txt file, you should get one :-)

One last note: There is a difference between directories and search engine crawlers. Before marketing you site or completing submissions you should identify a list of directories and crawlers. Make sure your web site is 100% ready tested, validated and full of quality content. Submit to directories first. Then submit to crawlers. I have had better results from sites that have been organically spidered by Google through a link then when I did a submission through Google web page crawler submit. There is speculation that you can avoid the sandbox by not submitting directly to Google.

I hope you find this helpful, Enjoy

Brian Johnson

[zee_b]

With regards to Brians informative post, i'm just wondering where exactly do you put the <h1> tags regarding:

[QUOTE][/I always recommend using the keyword phrases in your Actinic breadcrumb (Netquotvar:Parentsectiontop) and make this a h1 tagQUOTE]

Just abit concerned with oversized text..

thanks in advance

Zee

[BPJSURF]

Dealing with the size of the h1 tag is rather simple. Define the h1, h2 and h3 tag within the cascading style sheet (actinic.css). Using the default h1 font and size would note look very nice. Consider sizing the h tags smaller in font size as you increase the numerical value, h1 = 12, h2 = 10 h3= 8.

By defining the tag in css you get much more flexibility in the appearance of the tag and its much easier to maintain the code.

Hope this information helps you.

Brian Johnson

[zee_b]

Hi Brian,

Thanks for that.

So should i hard code <h1><font-size:12></h1></font> like this?

For the life of me i cant see "ParentSectionTop" - i can see parentsectionslink ... i did look at both views. Any ideas?

When i do eventually find it, is it then a case of doing the hardcode h1 and font size like above?

Thanks a lot brian

Zee

[BPJSURF]

here is a sample of code in the (actinic.css file)

/* [-] Heading specific styles */
H1, H3, H4, H5, H6 {
font-family:Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
}

H2 {
font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size: 12px;
font-weight: bold;
color: #071D81;
text-decoration: none;
line-height: 14px;

I would not hard code into the design just simpley apply the class tag as needed to the correct netquotvars in the template. This way you can modify the class in the css file if you need to change color or size. You may want to review use of css before you implement into your code.

Depending on your template you may be using a different layout and thus a different netquotvar. I would view the source and locate the template, make teh change as needed.

Brian

[zee_b]

Brian many thanks

[David@MPL]

Save starting another thread about meta tags, I'll just piggy-back this one seen as it's near the top . . .

Does anyone have any thoughts about what the maximum/recommended length for the meta description tag? A quick google says about 200-250 characters, sound sensible?