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The meta tags are HTML tags that provide information to describe the content of a web page that a user will be viewing. |
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The meta tags go in the <head> of the page: <HEAD> <title>Title of page</title> </HEAD> |
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The meta tags used to be important in the past, but abuse of them, as they are easy to stuff with keywords due to the weight previously given by search engines, means that they do not carry much, if any weight these days. The use of meta tags do not do any harm, they just do not do as much good as they used to. Other factors are now used by search engines to rank sites. |
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The only meta tag that really carries any weight with search engines is the title tag. This is a really important one. It should be used to accurately describe the content of the site, preferably with the keyword being targeted by the page at or near the beginning. |
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The description and keyword tags play a very small or no role in the indexing and ranking of a site. They are worth including, but not worth loosing any sleep over. The description should at least include the keyword that is in the title and that the page is targeting. It is tempting to include every possible word that you want the site to rank for in the keyword meta tag, but its not really going to do any good, unless the keyword(s) are supported elsewhere on the off the page (eg in the title of the page; mentioned several times on the page; or in the anchor text of incoming links). It is probably best to restrict the keyword tag to just a few words that the page is targeting. The title, description and keyword meta tags should be different for each page, reflecting the content of that page. |
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The only other meta tag possibly worth consider is the robots meta tag which is used to instruct the search engine spiders or crawlers on how to index, or how not to index the page. Without a robots meta tag, the default is "index, follow", which lets the search engine spiders assume that you want your page indexed by the search engine and to follow the links. There are six attributes to the robots tag: index, follow, noindex, nofollow, all and none. Using the noindex, nofollow, index and follow tags there are four possible tags: <meta name="robots" content="index, follow"> Index means that robots include this page in the search. Follow means that robots are follow links from the page to other pages. Noindex and nofollow have the opposite affect. The "all" and "none" tags are to be used as follows: <meta name="robots" content="all"> "All" is the same as "index, follow" and. "None" is the same as "noindex, nofollow". If you want a page indexed and the links followed, a robots meta tag is not needed. If there are parts of the site that you do not want crawled or indexed, the peferred standard is a robots.txt file, but it does no harm to also have the "noindex, nofollow" tag. |
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There are many other meta tags that can be used, but they are just not supported by search engines, so are not worth cluttering up the page with. The more a search engine spider has to crawl through in the head of a page, the harder it is for it to get to the real content of the page that counts. |
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A myth doing the rounds for a while now and implemented on a lot of sites is this tag: <meta name="revisit-after" content="3 days"> Search egines visit sites on their own schedule following links and will not follow this type of meta tag. |
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| What do others think: | ||||||||||||||||||
Google and meta tags (SEO Chat) Meta Tags (SEO Chat) The Meta Description Tag (High Ranking Advisor) |
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