Here’s what I have learned about meta tags
for my latest site–gamblingteachers.com
Title – up to about 60 characters including spaces.
Description – up to about 130 characters including spaces.
Keywords – no more than 5 to avoid ‘stuffing’
1) Consider your title and description as an ‘ad’ for that page. Certainly include the keyword(s) no more than twice for that page, but ‘sell it’.
Don’t use the same wording for title and description. This is free ad space for the search engines, use it to your advantage.
2) At the same time, be very specific about what your page is about, so search engines can crawl and categorize the page correctly .
If you are talking about hold’em, use hold’ em poker to pick up visitors who may just browse for poker. Set up the file name as /holdem-poker
Example: when I first set up my videopoker pages, I put the comma in the keywords like this: video, poker instead of video poker, and I found the search engines were classifying my site for the word ‘video’ – yikes!
3) Include your keywords in the title of the text/article and the first 90 characters of the text. Word it exactly as the file name.
4) Use your specific keywords about 12 times for every 500 words. Don’t ‘stuff’ your keyword(s) in the first 500 words–spread it/them around evenly if the text is over 1000 words.
12 times is a guess, but the neat resource with my current service is that they have a tool ‘Analyzer’ that tells you if your metas are ok, number of keywords in text and gives you a rating to correct for search engines.
Since I decided to go with a reputable site builder/hosting service, it’s like I have gone back to webmaster school and it has been a great learning experience, but exhausting to put up 200+ pages.
Hope this helps.
5) Another one – be sure to put a link with your keywords in it on the page. I do it this way–when the article about holdem poker is finished, I put up a live link that reads: ‘After holdem poker, there is an article about omaha poker’.
OK, I’ll say goodbye now. 