As a Lone Wolf business owner you are most likely the webmaster of your site. Unless you have turned that function over to someone else (like your girl friend, your 2nd cousin "Harry," or the six year old next door), you will be in charge of optimizing your site for key words, meta tags, and other little HTML goodies that tell the search engines what your site is all about.
Many of us are in business to make money (imagine that . . .) and we certainly don't want to spend time fiddling around with such trivial matters as web site coding and search engine optimization.
Yet, if you are the "lone wolf," the one and only person responsible for every aspect of your business, you have the responsibility to see to every detail that needs attention.
Certainly the optimization of your site for search engines is important. How important it is to you personally, though, depends upon your desire to be found and indexed by the spiders that crawl the Internet looking for relevant and fresh content.
The question, "How important are meta tags to the search engines?" is one that seems to have a fair amount of debate attached.
I am not an HTML or optimization specialist. All I can report is what I have noticed and watched from those in the industry.
Most seem to agree that meta tags used to be very important in the early days of the Internet, are no longer viewed as being quite so important, but since they're easy to include in a web site, you may as well take advantage of this little tool just in case meta tags are important to whomever is noticing!
Is that confusing enough?
Let's not get too far ahead of ourselves though, in case we have some folks with us that don't have a clue what a meta tag is or what it does.
A meta tag is an HTML (hyper-text markup language) flag or marker that identifies the contents and description of a particular web page for a search engine spider.
You don't view or see a meta tag -- it's hidden from the viewer's sight of the page. You can find it, though, if you select "View" then "Source" in your web browser menu. The meta tags are located in the "Head" section of the HTML code.
Examples of specific meta tags are the title tag, distribution meta tag, and keywords tags. They are short, relevant descriptions of your web site that tell the search engines how to classify and categorize your site. Often the descriptions you provide as meta tags show up in the search engine results as the summary description of your site.
These descriptions used to be very important to search engine results. But as the industry and technology has matured, the search engines have chosen to use other ways (other than the webmaster's own description) to decide what your site is all about.
Part of the reason, at least, that some feel meta tags have lost their importance is because webmasters are not always truthful and sometimes try to manipulate the system to their advantage by stuffing tons of key words and other irrelevant promotional descriptions into their meta tags.
Search engine traffic is very important to most small businesses. In fact, there is now a whole industry of services that do nothing but optimize web sites to achieve the highest search engine rankings possible, especially in Google, Yahoo, and MSN.
In our next installment, we'll continue the debate about whether or not you need to worry about meta tags.
See you then . . .
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