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As any Web Business startup knows, creating a Website is a bunch of work! You have to bother with content, layout, graphics and HTML links, just to name a few. What about your Meta Tags?

Meta Tags are words that are placed in your web page to provide a title, description and keywords to the Search Engine spiders or crawlers. They are not visible to visitors. To see a sample, open any website and click "View" on the menubar, and choose "Source." You'll see the Meta Tags up top, within the Head section of the web page.

Most Search Engines will rank your site on how well your Meta Tags provide a description of the content of your web pages. Google is the exception; it also take's into account the number and quality of backward links to your website. Here lately, there's been differing opinions on the relevancy of Google's Page Rank system. Some experts don't consider it accurate or necessary.

Yet and still, there are many other Search Engines and a further study of Meta Tags is in order. We are going to base our Meta Tags revision on a tool known as a word Frequency Counter. It counts and separates the words in a web page or document, giving you an idea of what words are used most.

Here are some Web based Frequency Counters:

• http://www.mytranslate.com/wordfrequency.htm
• http://rainbow.arch.scriptmania.com/tools/word_counter.html
• http://www.writewords.org.uk/word_count.asp
• http://www.writewords.org.uk/phrase_count.asp
• http://web4future.com/free/wordcount.htm
• http://www.keywordcount.com/

Each one of the Frequency Counters above has different uses and qualifications. The Writewords counter has two flavors: word and phrase count. The Web4Future counter is Web based or a standalone download.

How to use them:

Copy and paste the content of the web page in question and see what the top word frequencies are. You can eliminate most articles and modifiers and concentrate on pure words. As an example: If your web page is about red and blue widgets, the words "red/blue/widgets" should have the highest frequency.

A Word of Caution About Writing Content:

Use the Frequency Counters AFTER you write the web page content. Don't allow word frequency to get in the way of your natural writing style. Do NOT attempt to hit a certain frequency percentage; you'll be penalized by many Search Engines for too much keyword usage.

In Closing

Though the word Frequency Counters are good tools for a quick check, nothing compares to laser-focused writing for good Meta Tags information. Let your writing flow naturally and stay concentrated on your subject keywords. If you do that, you'll find it easy to weave your keywords into your content and Meta Tags.

by Francisco Aloy

(C)2004 Francisco Aloy