What Are Meta Tags?Meta tags are tags written within the <head> 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 largely disregarded by Search Engines and typically not useful for SEO; however, when used correctly. a select few can help your site!
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.
The keywords tag is the most disputed meta tags of them all. Some people say they work great, some people say they don’t work at all. Here’s the reality. People for many years abused the meta keywords tag. They stuffed them with competitor names and totally unrelated, but often searched keywords. As a penalty for this most search engines greatly reduced, or totally removed keywords tags from their ranking algorythms. For example, Google does not use the keyword meta tags at all. On the flip side however many programs, especially those involving advertising, will use meta tags to generate appropriate ads and content. So while the tag is useful, it will not help your site SEO.
When using this tag, exercise caution. Make sure your chosen keywords are related, and present in the content of the page. Ie. if you page is about dog training, don’t include keywords about losing belly fat. You should use 5 to a maximum of 10 comma separated and specific keywords (don’t be broad!).
Should I use it? Yes
The description tag i the most important meta element. Click through rate, or CTR is a measurement of how many people see a link and decide to click it. A coherent and well written description makes your link more appealing to click. So if you use it on your page a much greater amount of people will be enticed to click through to you website on search engines. To use this tag , write a description using words and keywords present on your page.If you do this correctly, search engines will use the description in the meta tag in the search results. Keep the description less that 40 words, mine is 15.
Should I use it? Yes.
This tag was developed for webmasters unable to upload a robots.txt file. Attributes can 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 is unnecessary. 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 describes what the content type of the web page is, for example the page this post is on is coded 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. This tag does not impact your SEO. If you do not include this tag, the users browser will use it’s default charset.
Should I use it? It is unnecessary unless you need a special character from a specific 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. Caching greatly reduces web-server workloads and costs so it is highly recommended to allow caching on your website.
Should I use it? Only if you do not wish to have your site cached.
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. This tag is useful if your site is in multiple languages, you can specify on each page what language it is on
Should I use it? If you are part of the special case mentioned above, then yes. Otherwise modern web browsers will automatically detect the language of your page.
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 safe 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 don’t 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 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? No.
Describes the type of page. Not used by 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 should re-index your 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.
http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/global.html#h-7.4.4
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html
Sean is a student web designer from Markham, Ontario who has been creating beautiful sites since the age of 12.
46 responses to "Meta Tags and SEO: The Definitive Guide"
Thanks For Sharing Your Informative Knowledge
Hey Sean,
Thanks for sharing such an insightful topic! I knew some of the above Meta-Tags but not all! Thanks once again for enlightening me!
Do mail me or comment if you too like my Blog, and, maybe we both can work out some unique strategy!
Cheerz to your success!
Swayam.
As well as detecting bad phrases, you may find some new good ones. For example, you may see that a keyword phrase you did not optimize your site for brings useful traffic despite the fact that your site is on the second or third page in search results for this phrase. Using this methods, you will arrive at a new refined set of keyword phrases.
You won’t get one the second page for any major search engine using that strategy and the more advanced ones (like google) may consider your site spammy and lower your ranking.
hey really thnq verymuch…nice info…
Your first tips, the description tag. You are right it is important. I think it is vital – but not for SEO – for CTR. It is no use having a number 1 position if nobody clicks. Getting the text right on the search results is as important as getting to the first page.
In refferance to the 1st tip you have if we use wordpress like you are using where do we put that? Well for that matter where would I put that 1 and the next 1 that you say is a must to use. Thanks alot for this blog as it is becomming very usefull.
Good resource. I saw this recommended in a forum and it was a good article. Its funny that you said for one of these, “save yourself the line”. It may be that not using useless meta tags is actually better if it will get your actual visible page content up higher in your site code.
@Pete You’re totally right and that was what I intended to write. Unfortunately I have a tendency to write at late hours of the night and I made a small mistake. Thank you for pointing that out, I will fix it.
@John, Try using an SEO plugin like All in one SEO Pack.
Excellent Post, It’s always good to run across new info. Thanks
Nice site.
Great Post! very easy to understand….
Very informative and helpful post, keep it up good work. Thanks
While not technically a meta tag the title tag is commonly lumped in with them when discussing the topic. I bring this up because the title tag can have a big impact on your rankings. I’ve had more than one client get on the first page of the search results just by updating or adding title tags.
Very useful post, i have to remove the author tag since i read somewhere that it’s an useful tag but i didn’t see any change since i’m using it
Thanks for the helpful information
this post is very usefull
lot of great information that i should learn
Great Post! very easy to understand….
Thanks for the clarification on meta tags – very helpful!
Love your site man keep up the good work
Actually, I think one should use the META-tag telling the browsers to cache pages. Google now puts more focus to how fast a page loads…
Thanks for sharing such an insightful topic.
how about the language tag?
great tips that will help better rank your site
thanks for the share
Very nice post.Tips are very useful.In future,We’ll concentrate more in the META tips.
Very useful meta tags!!!!thanks for sharing such type of informative article.
Thanks this is just what I was looking for. I’m updating my site now
It can be useful to check the meta tags in the source code of your pages and sites if you are using WordPress to make sure you put a description there. It is so easy to leave it out accidentally when using WordPress. then you end up with none or an automatically generated one depending how your site is configured.
Does anyone know if the “keywords” meta tag is as useful now as it once was in the past? I keep hearing different answers to this question, from “don’t bother including it anymore” to “yes, it’s still vital to SEO.” Seems like since it’s probably better to be safe than sorry and it’s still worthwhile to include, but I’ve heard so many different answers to this question that I’m not sure what to think anymore…
Hey Ajijic, as stated in the post, the keywords tag is next to useless unless you are using an onsite advertising program that utilizes them.
Sean,
Great article. I was wondering if meta category is a valid meta tag to have on a website for SEO. Could you elaborate?
Thanks,
T
Meta Category will not have any effect on your site’s SEO.
Did you ever consider adding some differing viewpoints to your article? I think it might enhance everyone’s understanding.
If you have an interested view point, post it and I will consider. However most of the differing viewpoints on the effectiveness on meta tags are wrong. That’s why I wrote this article, to inform people the on truth of meta tags.
My partner and I have been looking for information like this for my questionnaire I am putting my thoughts into. Thank you very much
Awesome
. Good luck with your questionnaire
I just sent this post to a bunch of my friends as I agree with most of what you’re saying here and the way you’ve presented it is awesome.
Thanks for the kind words.
Hi could I copy a few sentences here in this post if I provide a backlink to your site? Peter
Most definitely, Peter.
great article. clear, concise, and exactly the description i was looking for. Its information like this that makes me feel that i can actually learn enough seo techniques to be as effective as i want to be for my website. thank you very much!
What a great web log. I spend hours on the net reading blogs, about tons of various subjects. I have to first of all give praise to whoever created your theme and second of all to you for writing what i can only describe as an fabulous article. I honestly believe there is a skill to writing articles that only very few posses and honestly you got it. The combining of demonstrative and upper-class content is by all odds super rare with the astronomic amount of blogs on the cyberspace.
What a great article I really liked reading it
Hey, you mention “Google does not use the keyword meta tags at all.”… just wondering if you had that from a Google source or your own research? I have the same conclusion but only because I tested it not because I heard it somewhere, just wondering if Google confirmed it in the past sometime?
Yes this conclusion comes from an official google source. Link
Thanks very much for your information.
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