The Definitive Information: Meta Tags And Web Optimization | Sean Pollock
What Are Meta Tags?
Meta tags are tags written within the section of an HTML document. They were originally developed to help the (at the time) dumb search engines learn what the page was about. In the past meta tags were extremely important; They were used mainly to link your page to common misspellings of your target keywords (For example, if someone searched Sean Polluck when looking for me). Nowadays search engines are a lot smarter, they automatically correct misspellings, and they can learn what a page is about from the content alone. On top of that, a common black-hat SEO practice was to stuff your meta tags with popular keywords that are irrelevant to your site in hopes of gaining some traffic. For these reasons Meta Tags are typically not useful for SEO. However, when used correctly they can help your site! This tutorial contains the two tags you should use, and how to use them, and all the other tags you may have been curious about!
Note that most of these are useless and a waste of time to use!
Also note that these tags are written in XHTML! (self closing tags)
Jump to: Meta Tags you should use on your site, Meta Tags you can you on your site, and Meta tags you should not use one you site.
Meta Tags you should use on your site
This tag describes the keywords linked with your webpage. This is one of the important ones that you should use.
You mustexercisecaution using this tag. Make sure the keywords you enter are related, and present in the content of the page. Ie if you page is about dog training, dont include keywords about porn. You should use around 5, with a maximum of 10 commonseparatedand specific keywords (dont be broad!).
Should I use it? Yes, read how and why to use the keywords meta tag.
This tag is one of the most important meta tags. It will impact your SEO, and it is worth using. If you use this tag you have a chance to control the description of your site in search engines. To use this tag effectively, create a description using the same words you used on the page. Keep it less that 40 words, mine is 15. If you do that correctly search engines should display what is in your description tag instead of random text taken from your page.
Should I use it?Yes.
Meta Tags you may want to use on your site
This tag was developed for webmasters unable to upload a robots.txt file. Attributescan be replaced with one or more of the following: noindex, nofollow, noarchive, all, index, or follow.
Should I use it? Using the tag with the index, follow, or all attributes isunnecessary. A search engine will index your whole site unless you tell it not to. With that said, if you do not want the search engine spider to crawl your page, and you cannot upload a robots.txt, by all means use it!
This tag tells what the content type of the web page is, for example the page this post is on is written in text and html so we would use the text/html type. The charset is up to you of course depending on whether or not you need special characters. I recommend UTF-8, it is an extremely versatile charset that should meet all your needs.
Should I use it? It is unnecessary unless you need a special character from a specific charset. This tag does not impact your SEO. If you do not include this tag, the users browser will use its default charset.
Most browsers will automatically cache (or save) parts of a website to the computer to save loading times. This meta tag instructs it not to. This tag does not impact your SEO.
Should I use it? Only use this on a page that is frequently updated.
Meta Tags you should not use!
This tag is intended for parental control software. Once again parental control software has gotten smarter since this tag has been implemented, and they can figure out which pages are bad or not without the tag. Other substitutes for all include: general, mature, adult
Should I use it?: No this tag is seldom utilized and you may as well save a line of code.
This tag states the author of the web page. What software utilizes this tag? I dont know to be honest. Many people like to have this tag on the page just so they can claim is as theirs.
Should I use it? This tag is another seldom used and largely unnecessary tag. You may as well save a line of code and not include it in your documents.
This tag states the language of the web page, English in this case. Very useful in the past, not so useful now. Most search engines are so sophisticated that not only can they detect the language of the page, they will translate it for you. The codes for different languages can be found at this website.
Should I use it? Nope, save yourself a line.
This tag states what software generated the page. The software can be anything from WYSWIG editors to wordpress. Mainly an advertisement for the software.
Should I use it? I suggest deleting it, if you want to keep your editors brand on your page then keep it.
This tag described the main theme of your site. Not used by many search engines and does not improve your SEO.
Should I use it? Not necessary but up to you.
Describes the type of page. Not used by many- if any search engines.
Should I use it? No.
Type of program used to edit the file. Similar to the generator. Essentially it is an advertisement for your program.
Should I use it? I suggest deleting it, but if you want to support your editor go ahead and keep it.
Publisher of the web page.
Should I use it? Nope.
This tag is a hint as to when the spider shouldre-indexyour site. This tag was developed for a Vancouver search engine called search B.C., and is not supported by any major search engines.
Should I use it? No.