A few weeks ago, I tuned into Cotorture’s blog radio show Fashion Blogging and SEO With Vyque of Fasshonaburu.com Vyque gave several great tips on how to increase traffic by making your site more searchable. Some of her tips included tagging your images, linking to other blogs and adding a meta tags in your site.

I decided to do some research on meta tags, and implement them on my sites, mostly because I was already practicing some other tips, and frankly I found the whole subject of meta-anything confusing. If you are just getting into the wonderful and enchanting world of HTML code… SEO type stuff, you’ll hear about meta tags.

Meta tags have been around for a long time, thier function is basically to define the webpage.

A meta tag is inserted after the HEAD tag, it’s where your page title is, many blog platforms has that already included in the template, so I left mine out. The “keywords” element was popularized back in the 90′s and a few search engines used them, until spam sites took advantage of this and used keywords to mislead users. Most search engines have stopped using the keywords element of the meta tag BUT the “description” element is still useful to us, it’s where we can write a description of the webpage.

After getting all gung ho over the the whole meta tag, page description thing, I went to go put the code on my page, only to realize that XHTML always needs every tag to be closed. Blogger Tips and Tricks gave some very good suggestions on this topic…

So in the end, your code should look like this:

This way, you can better control what page descriptions go out there… oh dear, many times I searched my blog, only to find random bits of whatever post Google picked up. Hopefully it wasn’t embarrassing. Either way, I threw in the keywords element in my own, just out of superstition, perhaps I’ll get some extra traffic, but more importantly, I have a better understanding of my website.