Meta tags contain information about a website. To the SEO
(search engine optimization) industry, meta tags and title tags
are critical to assist with search engine rankings. Think of
these tags as your way to help influence how you define the
topic of an individual webpage.

Understanding Search Engine Results:

When you go to a site such as Google and perform a search for a
keyword phrase, the site returns ten (10) results and each
result entry has 3 sections:

1. Title of the page (title tag) 2. Description (meta
description or snippet of text) 3. Destination URL (address of
the webpage)

Let’s review how meta tags and title can influence search engine
results. Title tags are technically a different tag, but for
purposes of illustration, we’ll group them under meta tags

What are meta tags?

Most commonly, there are three types of meta tags that a SEO
expert will focus on:

1. title tags 2. meta description 3. meta keyword

Tip: To review meta tags for a page type “Ctrl + u” when your
Internet browser window is open (Firefox only).

Title Tags:

Title tags are the words seen on the top left hand corner of
your internet browser. For example, visit <A
href=http://CNN.com>http://CNN.com</A> and look in the top left
hand corner. You’ll see the text “CNN.com - Breaking News, U.S.,
World, Weather, Entertainment & Video News.” This text is the
title tag and it help identifies to the search engines what your
page is about. There is a character limit on how much text a
search engine will read. As a best practice be specific, but
descriptive and try to keep the title tag under 100 characters
or 10-12 words.

Meta Description Tags:

The meta description is a text statement that gives an abstract
about what the page is about. Search engines can only read about
255 characters, so most descriptions are limited to 1-2
sentences. What is significant about the meta description tag is
the potential opportunity to influence how your page appears in
a search engine. The 1-2 lines of text under the title of a page
in a search engine can be influenced by the meta description tag.

Tip: PDF’s do not have meta descriptions. To influence the text
in a search engine result, focus on the first visible text
available. The first text phrase on the PDF will act as a
substitute for a meta description tag.

Meta Keyword Tags:

What keywords are important within your page’s content? The meta
keyword tag is an opportunity to highlight and reinforce
important of keyword phrases. Meta keyword tags should be less
than 500 characters.

The Role of Keyword Research:

An SEO professional conducts keyword research to get a magnitude
of what keywords are popular among search engine users. This
information is useful to incorporate these keyword phrases into
the webpage’s content. The webpage’s content and keyword
research play a role in guiding the SEO professional towards
what information should be included within meta tags on a given
page.

Creating Meta Tags Onsite or Outsource?

Depending on your industry, time constraints and budget will
influence the decision to perform keyword research and create
meta tags in-house or to outsource to a professional search
engine optimization agency. As a benchmark, do you currently
rank in the top 30 results (pages 1-3) in a search engine for a
keyword phrase you think a customer would type in? The more
competitive the industry, the more benefit you will find
consulting with an SEO firm.

Many search engine optimization agencies recommend conducting in
depth keyword research, followed by implementation of keyword
phrases into existing content. Modifying the webpage’s content
by incorporating popular keyword phrases will help improve the
page’s ability to rank for a given keyword phrase. The process
is completed with the creation of meta tags and title tags as a
compliment to the on page content. The result will be a circular
process that leverages descriptive on page content to help
identify to the search engines what your site is about.

About the author:
Keith Hanks is an Account Manager at Atlanta search engine optimization agency TwentySix2 Marketing.He has a passion for Atlanta SEO agency services and Atlant web design services.

History of the Search Engine - What Came Before Google?
By Jeff Casmer

Although we credit Google, Yahoo, and other major search engines for giving us the system we use to find the information we seek, the concept of hypertext came to life in 1945 when Vannaver Bush urged scientist to work together to help build a body of knowledge for all man kind. He then proposed the idea of a virtually limitless, fast, reliable, extensible, associative memory storage and retrieval system. He named this device a memex.

But there is a long list of great minds that have given us the information system we now use today. This article illustrates some of them.

Here is the History of the Search Engine:

Ted Nelson

Ted Nelson created Project Xanadu in 1960 and coined the term hypertext in 1963. His goal with Project Xanadu was to create a computer network with a simple user interface that solved many social problems like attribution. While Ted’s project Xandadu, for reasons unknown, never really took off much of the inspiration to create the WWW came from Ted’s work.

George Salton

George Salton was the father of modern search technology. He died in August of 1995. His teams at Harvard and Cornell developed the Salton’s Magic Automatic Retriever of Text
otherwise known as the SMART informational retrieval system. It included important concepts like the vector space model, Inverse Document Frequency (IDF), Term Frequency (TF), term
discrimination values, and relevancy feedback mechanisms. His book A theory of indexing explains many of his tests. Search today is still based on much of his theories. History of the search engine uses some of the same techniques even today.

Alan Emtage

In 1990 a student at McGill University in Montreal, by the name of Alan Emtage created Archie; the first search engine. It was invented to index FTP archives, allowing people to
quickly access specific files. Archie users could utilize Archie’s services through a variety of methods including e-mail queries, teleneting directly to a server, and eventually through the World Wide Web interfaces. Archie only indexed computer files. With Archie, Alan Emtage helped to solve the data scatter problem. Originally, it was to be named “archives” but was changed to Archie for short.

Paul Lindner and Mark P. McCahill

Archie gained such popularity that in 1991 Paul Linder and Mark P. McCahill created a text based information browsing system that uses a menu-driven interface to pull information
from across the globe to the user’s computer. Named for the Golden Gophers mascot at the University of Minnesota, The name is fitting, because Gopher “tunnels” through other Gophers located in computers around the world, arranging data in a hierarchical series of menus, which users can search for specific topics.

Tim Burners-Lee

Up until 1991 until there was no World Wide Web. The main method of sharing information was via FTP. Tim Berners-Lee wanted to join hypertext with the internet. He used similar ideas to those underlying the Enquire (a prototype created with help from Robert Cailliau) to create the World Wide Web, for which he designed and built the first web browser and editor, called WorldWideWeb, and developed on NeXTSTEP. He then created the first Web server called httpd, short for HyperText Transfer Protocol daemon.

The first Web site built was at http://info.cern.ch/ and was first put online on August 6, 1991. Tim Burners-Lee created the World Wide Web Consortium in 1994. Tim also created the Virtual Web library which is the oldest catalogue of the web. The history of the search engine is a fascinating story.

About the Author: Jeff Casmer is an internet marketing consultant and work at home business owner. For more information on search engines optimization please visit his “Top Ranked” Improve Search Engine Rankings Directory gives you all the information you need to Work at Home in the 21st century.