SEO Tips For Internet Marketers

 

The meta tags are hidden tags within the header of your web page and are designed to provide engines extra information about the page they are crawling.

As this is SEO basics I am going to stick to the basic tags.  The meta tags are broken into two main elements which are the “name” and the “content”.  Here is an example of what a meta tag looks like:

keywords is still a commonly used meta tag, but Google no longer uses the keywords meta tag in its search results.  Here is a Youtube clip by the Google webmasters:The description tag, unlike the Keywords tag, is still used by most search engines and should accurately describe the content that will be found on your web page.  The tag itself should be kept below 40 words where possible.The content-language meta defines the language of the page.  Most search engines don’t require this tag, because they are sophisticated enough to determine the language by the content.  A full list of language codes can be found here: Language Meta Codes.ROBOTS is a tag created for webmasters who cannot create or upload a robots.txt file.  The robot meta tells a search engine crawler how to index the page.  The following attributes are available; noindex, nofollow, noarchive, all, index, or follow.  You don’t really need to use the all, index or follow attributes because a search engine will crawl you site unless you tell it not to.

W3 provide a great resource list going through all the meta tag detail.  Check that out here: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/global.html#h-7.4.4

At the end of the day the meta tag you should give real attention to is the description and the one to avoid is the keywords.

Labels: Basics