There has been some controversy over the last few years about which meta tags to employ.  There are many meta tags commonly used by people when developing sites, and not all of them are valuable.  Let's take a look at a few of the helpful ones and discuss them.

Title:  This is one of the most important meta tags.  This tag displays the title of the page in the title bar of your browser, and is also where the search engines get the name of the site.  This tag should be crafted in such a way to reflect keywords relevant to the page's content.  A rule of thumb is to try to keep the title six to twelve words long.

Keywords:  The keywords tag is also very important to your site's optimization.  In the past, people simply crammed as many repetitions of their key phrases into this tag as possible.  Do that now, and you'll be banned for sure!  The phrases in the keywords tag should be targeted towards the content of the page, and should contain around 50 words.

Description:  The description tag is a great place to sum up what your company does.  This tag has also been controversial lately.  Some people consider it a waste of time, and others dismiss it outright.  It seems that sites which don't use this tag are missing out.  I have seen instances in Yahoo's index where the text from the description tag was listed right after the page title.  The description tag is a good place to summarize what your company is about, and to squeeze in a few extra targeted phrases.  The targeted length for the description tag is around 30 words.

Summary:  The summary tag is one of the most overlooked tags.  This is a great tag to summarize your page's content, and provide a brief description of your product.  This tag is not widely used by search engines, but still comes into play when optimizing for the best code:content ratio.  The summary tag should also be around 30 words long.

The way we look at meta tags at Internet Marketing Resources is that if a tag contains good information for the visitor, it will be considered valuable by the search engines. 

For optimization of YOUR site's tags, contact the experts at Internet Marketing Resources, Inc.

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