Search Engine Positioning

Meta Tag Tips and how meta tags relate to search engine optimization

Posted on | September 8, 2008 | No Comments

What are meta tags?

Meta tags are special HTML tags that do not affect how the page is displayed, but instead provide information such as who created the page, how often it is updated, what the page is about, and which keywords represent the page’s content. Many search engines use this information when building their listings.Meta Tags - Meta Tag Tips

Where are meta tags?

Go to any web page, even this page for example, and click your right mouse button. A menu will appear and on that menu you should select ‘View Page Source.’ This will show you the page’s source code. Underneath the <head> tag you will most likely find a series of meta tags, such as these meta tag examples below:

<title>The name of your site</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”What is this page about”>
<meta name=”keywords” content=”What, words, describe, this, page,”>
<meta name=”author” content=”your name”>
<meta name=”language” content=”en-usa”>
<meta name=”revisit-after” content=”30 days”>
<meta name=”owner” content=”your name”>
<meta name=”copyright” content=”Copyright© 1996 – 2003 your name, All rights reserved”>
<meta name=”contact_addr” content=”email@address.com”>
<meta name=”rating” content=”general, adult, etc.”>
<meta name=”robots” content=”all or noindex”>
<meta name=”distribution” content=”global or country specific”>
<meta name=”classification” content=”your category”>
<meta http-equiv=”reply-to” content=”email@address.com”>

How do I use HTML Meta Tags?

While the above list lets you know what information should go into some of the most common meta tags, how to use HTML meta tags to your optimization advantage is the tricky part.

Meta Tag Tips #1: Your Meta Tags Must Match Your Content

Since the meta tags aren’t seen by your website visitors and only used by the search engines and their crawlers to help list your site, some unprincipled web developers used the meta tags to mislead the search engines by stuffing the meta tags full of keywords not related to the site.

The search engines retaliated, some of them dropping the use of meta tags entirely (see Death of a Meta Tag by Search Engine Watch) and some by placing much more severe restrictions on meta tag use. Generally speaking, if the content in your meta tags doesn’t match the visible content on your site, you could be blacklisted or punished in the listings by the search engines. So ensure that your meta tag content and visible content match.

Meta Tag Tips #2: Spend Your Time Refining These Tags Only

  • The ‘Meta Robots’ tag has the benefit of full support, but only use it if you do not want certain pages indexed. <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”>
  • The ‘Meta Description’ tag also enjoys much support. Just remember tip #1. In fact, the easiest method of building your description tag is to just take a few descriptive sentences from your content.
  • The ‘Meta Keywords’ tag is only supported by some major crawlers. Make this tag third on your ‘to-do’ list.
  • Any other meta tag you see may be used by specialized search engines, but will largely be ignored by the major crawlers.

Meta Tag Tips #3: Your Title Tag Will Be Used As Your Listings Title

While not a ‘meta tag’ per se, the title tag is still an important tag and deserving of its own tip in our meta tag tips list. Whatever text you place in the title tag will appear in multiple important places, including:

  • The reverse bar of your browser when viewing a web page. If you look at the reverse bar in your browser for this page, voila, there you’ll see what’s in the title tag for this page.
  • The title tag is also used as the words to describe your page when someone adds it to their “Favorites” or “Bookmarks” lists.
  • All major crawlers will use the text of your title tag as the text they use for the title of your page in your listings.

Therefore, spend the time to make your title tag short, descriptive and catchy. It could be the difference between lots of clicks from the search engine listings, or almost none.

Other Meta Tag Resources:

Category: Copy Writing, Expanding Search Engines, Market, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Positioning Tips and Secrets, Search Engine Submissions

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