Search Engine Optimization is another way to improve your page rank. As search engine robots and crawlers check over your website, they seek key words so that someone using a search engine gets sites that best match their needs. Simply incorporating certain keywords into your website text will improve the chances of someone finding your site when they search for those words.

Sometimes, though, you can’t fit those words into the text – for example, my Hikes with Tykes: A Practical Guide to Day Hiking with Kids book would appeal to parents, fathers, mothers, grandparents, grandfathers, grandmothers, Boy Scout leaders, Girl Scout leaders, and teachers. Getting “parents” and “grandparents” into text on my website was easy enough, but the other words felt forced. To get around that, we can use meta tags.

Meta tags are coding you insert into your website to let search engine robots and crawlers identify these words as relevant. When someone types “Boy Scout Leader” into their search engine, my website might pop up, whereas before it stood no chance at all of doing so.

There are two types of meta tags that are important to your website. One is the “description,” which is a 150-200 character sentence telling what your website is all about. The other is the “keyword” in which you list words that don’t necessarily appear on your site; since someone typing them into a search engine likely would find your site useful, it will now pop up for them.

To add meta tags to your website, you’ll need to access the screen in which your website appears as html text (this is all of the coding used to build your website). You can find this on the website host pages where you built your site. Look for in the html code (it should be near the top). After it, copy and paste the following two meta tags:

<META name=”description” content=”A 200-character description of your webpage goes here.”>

<META name=”keywords” content=”keywords, go, here”>

Next, write in the quotations marks following “content=” your website description in the first meta tag and the keywords in the second one. Keywords must be separated by a comma (as shown in the meta tag above).

Be sure to save this change. Within a month or two, you should begin seeing results as search engine robots and crawlers identify them.

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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past decade, I’ve helped more than 300 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the 7 Minutes a Day… writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.