Don't Forget Your Meta Tags!
  Written By Titmowse

You got that killer content. You put it on your site with it's killer layout. You found killer sponsors. You posted banners links to them on your killer site and you put your site on a killer host. Then you spent days and nights killing yourself submitting your killer page to all the search engines. You sit back and wait for the hits to make your killer counter explode. Only this is, you aren't getting any hits and it's killing you.

Where did you go wrong? Do the gods of the search engines have something against you? Is having a successful adult website just not in the cards for you? Well, the plans the fates have in store for you are not within my powers to predict. I can tell you that there might be one thing you may have overlooked in all your killer efforts. You may have neglected to code your META TAGS.

What the blankety blank is a friggin META TAG? You ask. META TAGS are what will make the difference between being indexed by search engines or letting your adult site die a sad, lonely death. You can have the best content, layout, sponsors or host in the world but if you don't have proper META TAGS, your hard work will never be found by enough people to generate any income.

A META TAG is an HTML coding statement that describes the contents of a page. The META TAG resides in the top of your page's code, in between the HEAD tags. If you solely use a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) website editor, this would be an opportune time for you to understand the importance of at least familiarizing yourself with the HTML (HyperText Markup Language) codes of your page. If your WYSIWYG editor does not allow viewing of the actual code of your site, then you can open your page in your notepad program to view and edit this code.

When you open your HTML page to see your code, you will notice that the top few lines of your code (depending on your HTML editing software) will read like this:

The top bracketed code is the opening code that tells browser software that this is an HTML page. At the bottom of the page, there will be a closing bracket just like it. Without that code, your page will not appear in browsing software. The second line is the HEAD tag and as you can see, it is closed with its bracketed tag. The next line is the TITLE tag and this is what appears in the task bar. The next two tags are the META tags. When search engines index your page, they first look at your site's TITLE tags. They then go further down and read your page's META tags.

While some search engine robots look a bit further into your page for clues as to what's located on it, having empty META tags will result in the search engine's software not properly indexing and listing your page. You WANT the search engines to find you. What should you put in between the quotation marks in you META tags? Well, the first META tag should be a description of your site. For instance, if you have an adult site that features pornographic anime, then a good sentence to add between the quotes would be: "The source for pornographic Hentai and Anime images ". What sentence you use to describe your website is entirely up to you, but it should be an accurate description of its content.

The second META tag is where you will put keywords. Keywords are search terms that you feel a user would type into a search engine to find your content. Keywords can be single words or phrases that are separated by commas. Good keywords for your Hentai site would be: "anime, toons, cartoons, Hentai, porn, sex cartoons, anime girls getting fucked". Once again, what keywords you choose to add to your META tags is your choice. Just keep in mind that throwing every possible word that relates to porn does not help your cause and can get you blacklisted by search engines. Your keywords should fit the category of porn your adult site contains. The amount of keywords you include should not be excessive either.

You should limit the amount of keywords and phrases to no more than twenty. Search directories use humans to review site submissions and search engines use robot software. Even if you submit your site to a search directory, you will want to code your META tags coded properly because the human editors will look at your META tags. Adding too many or inappropriate keywords or inaccurately describing the contents of your site will hurt your site's chances of getting listed by these very important sources of traffic.

Here are some links that you will find helpful in making your META tags so they will get you the traffic you need:

Web Developer's META tag tutorial:
http://www.webdeveloper.com/html/html_metatags.html

SearchEngineWatch META tag tutorial:
http://searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/meta.html

Of course, you should never stop with just your META tags and submission to search engines. You should promote your site in as many ways as you legally can. But without properly coded META tags, none of your other efforts will help you.