People say that the use of meta tags are dead, a useless addition to your web site, but are they wrong? Meta tags still serve a useful purpose in every web site. Even though not all search engines utilize these tags they still hold extremely important information about your web site and it’s content.
Not only do meta tags tell a search engine spider about your web site, it also provides instructions telling the spider what you would like it to do and not do.
First let’s look at what meta tags tell us about your web site:
The first tag in your meta tags should be your title tag, in my opinion this is the most important tag you can control. This tag should state your company and no more then 3 key words that pertain to that page. An example of this is
SEO ONE, inc. Search Engine Optimization, Internet Marketing, SEO.
Keyword tag should be the next in line of importance. This tag is fairly straight forward however there are rules on how many keywords you should have. The rule of thumb is around 10 but I recommend no more then 3 keywords. The reason for this is the more keywords you have the more difficult it is to keep the weighted average where it needs to be above 54%. It also becomes difficult to match the keywords in the site to the keyword meta tags. An example of this meta tag is
The 3rd in succession should be your description tag, in this tag we want to describe the web page we are on, and again we have another opportunity to list our 3 key words for this page. This is important do not over look this. It is also critical to keep the order the keywords appear. An example of this tag is
Now we are onto the part of the tags that tell the search engine what you would like for it to do with your web site. These tags are also critical as we can in some cases direct the spider through your web pages.
This tag tells the search engine you would like it to visit your home page, follow all linked pages, and cashes all pages it passes through. This is important because it allows the engine to store your site in it’s data base.
In this tag we tell the spider to come back to our web site every 7 days to search for more content. As a web page changes the content needs to be re indexed in order for it to be relevant. This tag can help us with this point.
There are many more tags, and more detailed information about the tags above, however I only wanted to give a general overview as to the importance of the above tags.