Meta tags are like bell-bottoms and mullets—they go out of style, and then they come back, over and over again. They also engender a love/hate relationship.

What the Heck are Meta Tags?

Meta tags are HTML tags that usually aren’t displayed but are designed to give the web browser or search engine more information. In the early days of the web, they were all the rage until the creators of web pages abused them and search engines began ignoring, or even penalizing, the use of meta tags.

Show Me a Meta Tag

There are lots of different meta tags, but here are some of the basics:

Author

This meta tag tells the world who the author of the page is. This tag doesn’t ever get penalized by search engines and is useful for claiming ownership of your pages.

Content Type

The content type meta tag determines which character set your page will use—this is important to make sure your characters are decoded the right way and that you don’t end up with a big mess of nonsense.

Description

This meta tag describes your page. You’ll want to keep this somewhat succinct, say no more than 256 characters. The description meta tag is one of the tags that was ignored or penalized by search engines, so you’ll want to make sure you use complete sentences and keep your description from being “spammy.”

Keywords

The keywords meta tag is the most abused meta tag of them all. People would stuff their keywords meta tag with hundreds of keywords, repeating the same words over and over and including words that had nothing to do with the content of the page. Search engines wised up, and you will get nailed if you do things like that. This doesn’t mean, however, that you should abandon this tag. Just write the keywords after you have made the rest of the page and include words that actually appear in the text of your page’s body.

There Are Still Reasons to Use Meta Tags

Not all search engines have abandoned or punished meta tags. Some may still use your keywords to determine what your page is about. Most importantly of all, your meta description is often what shows up as the description a search engine offers in its results. Try this query for Diamond Lime and compare the description to the meta description of the home page:

Your pages will work better and rank better if you make judicious use of meta tags.

Web analytics are an increasingly important part of how you run your Internet marketing efforts. Long gone are the days of flying a tempermental biplane with a scarf and goggles—you need radar, infrared, and afterburners.

Elite Web Analytics

Many Internet marketers work for large clients and need the best analytics that money can buy. Omniture’s client list proves that its Site Catalyst is definitely in this category.

Budget Web Analytics

Some of us need as much horse power as we can afford. Our financial position or the smaller size of our clients dictates that we choose something less than top-of-the-line. Clicktracks Analyzer runs $495 a user license (as of Jan. 06). The advantage of Clicktracks is that it’s a one-time purchase of software that you can use forever after.

Free Web Analytics

You don’t have to publicly admit it, but your web analytics plane may look more like a paper airplane—you may not have any budget for analytics at all. There are a few solutions that are reputable, like Google Analytics and StatCounter. Google has had to stop accepting new subscriptions because of the volume of demand, and so StatCounter seems to be the next best choice.

Flight Lessons

Whatever solution you choose, make sure that your web analytics solution can generate reports in real time. Waiting to see the effects of a change can be detrimental to your business, or very boring. You don’t want your plane to stall.

Learn what the statistics mean. I will be including some of them later, but for now you can just use a search engine to find them.

Aces

Any of you statistics aces out there who have “shot down” multiple web analytics packages or who have found a favorite way to fly, feel free to comment—help the novices get off the ground. What’s your favorite analytics package and why?

It’s 1984. . .

and Big Brother is watching you. Incessant noise comes from the box on the wall, and Big Brother’s minions are able to watch your every move.

Well, not yet anyway.

The Feds Want Google’s Data

The Federal Government has issued Google a subpoena to give it access to 1 million random web addresses (IP addresses that are assigned to each computer) and records of all Google searches for any one week period. ( Feds After Google Data, Mercury News)

The twisted thing is that the government is doing this in accordance with an anti-pornography act meant to keep children from accessing such content that was struck down by the Supreme Court two years ago.

Since when do federal law enforcement agencies ignore the Supreme Court?

Google is Resisting

Luckily, Google is vigorously resisting this subpoena on the grounds that they aren’t part of the lawsuit in question and that it would be a violation of Google users’ privacy rights to release such information.

I hope Google wins because if they don’t, it won’t be long until Big Brother is watching your every move and punishing you for anything it doesn’t like.

Google bombing (aka link bombing) is a term that refers to the use of many, many links with identical link text to boost the ranking of a particular page for the search term(s) in the link text. Basically, it’s a search engine optimization tactic used to game the search engines.

Why is it called “Google Bombing?”

It’s called Google bombing because it is especially effective with Google, although basically every search engine uses some kind of link popularity algorithm to determine its results.

Bombing, Graffiti, Deception

The reason bombing is in the name is that people often use this tactic for political, revenge, or goof-off purposes. One of the most famous political Google bombs is a search for “miserable failure.” Enough sites and links use this link text and point at George Bush’s Biography that it comes up as the number one search result. Daniel Brandt is fighting a smear campaign that utilizes Google bombing. Finally, do a search for “French military victories” - a geeky prank brings up a fake search results page that claims the French have no military victories.

Google Bombing = Black Hat. Link Building = White Hat

It’s interesting that Google bombing is exactly the same as a link building campaign. Bombing is unethical, but link building is not. So use the examples of the bombers to work for good purposes. Use correct link text and be constructive instead of smearing people’s good names and messing up search results. Be a good guy and wear a white SEO hat.

More Links on Google Bombs:

• Wikipedia on Google bombs
• Ramifications of Google bombs on Search
• List of famous Google bombs

After a long, involuntary break, The Lime Blog is back. A series of problems with Blogger, henceforth known as ultra-basic blogging service, crippled my blogging capabilities. BYU finals, Christmas, and New Year’s made it hard to find time to repair things.

Finally, though, I have new blogging software running and a shiny new template for my site. Most of my pages have been converted over, and most of the posts from the ultra-basic blogging service version of my blog have been copied. I’m still working on some posts and all of the comments that were left.

Wordpress is Fantastic

After looking at several options for blogging software, I decided to try Wordpress 1.5.2. I’m so glad I did. Amazing! Totally a snap to set up, configure, and build my own theme for. So easy! So powerful!

DiamondLime Makeover

The long-ago promised makeover for DiamondLime has finally happened. I still have a few bugs to work out, but I’m curious what you think. How do you like the new design? Is there anything you would change? How does it compare to the old one?