Meta Tags... basic help needed please.

Hi guys,

Lots of people's sites have meta tags with loads of stuff that makes no sense to me. I know there should be keywords listed but is a description necessary? And what about any other stuff?

If someone could point me to a good meta tag generator or let me know what the essential parts of a good meta tag are I'd appreciate it!

Thanks a lot,
Kirsty

 

These are all you need:

<META name="description" content="xxxxxxxx">
<META name="description" keywords="xxxxxx">

HTML:

The content one id very important - it usually forms the description you see next to each site in the search results. Make it attractive to humans and not too long as only a certain number of characters will be shown in the search results.

The keywords tag is less important (some say not needed at all) but you may as well include it anyway.

 

try this right after the <TITLE> tag ...

<meta name="description" content="This is your description .. ">
<meta name="keywords" content="yadda, yadda, bing, boom, ding ding ding ... ">

Code (markup):

If I'm not mistaken, keep the 'description' to less that 250 characters.
As for 'keywords', it's mixed on length, but I think it's wide open (no keyword stuffing)

Some engines pick this up, while to others it is not relevant at all ...

this is a good one to add as well ...

<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="FOLLOW,INDEX">

Code (markup):

 

I agree with mad4 and anton,
In fact, I only use the keywords and description tag in all my site. They are useful. The rest of the tag... hmmm.. let me know...

 

What does this one do? <META NAME="robots" CONTENT="FOLLOW,INDEX">

Oh and should the description stay the same across all the pages?

 

I try to change description from page to page ...


'robots' : http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/meta-user.html

 

Not in that form. Read the google webmasters guide. It should only be used to exclude. Inclusion is assumed.

We use this tag as well...

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">

HTML:

 

Nothing at all. The default is that robots may index your pages. This meta tag should be used for pages you want to exclude.

It's one of those tags that gets misused and misunderstood.

 

The robots tag tells those that 'follow the rules' to index the page and follow links to their destination (e.g. keep going).

As for the description being the same, absolutely not. Make each page unique and have the tags, on page text, etc. specific to what the page is truly about. Ideally, have links (i.e. internal and inbound from external sites) pointing specific link text to the exact page of your site where that content resides. It makes no sense to point everyone to your home page if the content they are looking for is on an internal page.

Remember that on the Internet, people are always one click away from leaving your site. Making the path of least resistance getting to their needed information is usually the best choice. IMHO

 

I would suggest going to google and doing a search on your keyword. Then visit the first three or four sites and check out their meta tags - see what they have and don't have, and see what they have in common. Use that information to decide what to put in your site.

 

I would be very careful about what strategies you use from other sites at the top of the results for your keywords. I cannot tell you how many times I have talked to someone whose site is banned because "they copied what their competitors were doing at the top of SE's."

One time I talked to a guy who put same colored text on background just because his main competitors were doing it and had top placement on certain keywords. You can imagine his surprise when several months later those competitors were nowhere to be found, and neither was he!

The best Meta tag generator is yourself!!

It is better to concentrate more effort and work into your page Titles rather than META Description and Keywords tags.

Meta tag character counts:

Title: between 50 and 70 characters including spaces and commas or 7 to 9 words (best to use your top keywords for the page here, be descriptive and use the most important words closer to the beginning of the title)

Description: between 150 and 200 characters including spaces and commas or 20 to 25 words (write descriptions that will bring a call to action by searchers, use words that will prompt them to click on your listing)

Keywords: up to 1000 characters or between 40 to 45 words (keywords tag is in question, and is no longer used by major SE's)

 

Having uppercase HTML elements and not including the trailing slash at the end means that his page would not qualify as XHTML 1.0 valid. A better example would be:

<meta name="description" content="description goes here..." />
<meta name="keywords" content="kw1,kw2,kw3" />

HTML:

 

What's that - what is the unique use of / in the last. Please Explain this.

 

xhtml requires a closing tag (e.g. </a>), and in the absence of a closing tag it requires a trailing />

 

Kind of off topic slightly, last week I changed my title & description tag and the serps are still showing the old tags, except for yahoo, they are showing the changed description tag, but the title tag is the old one. Does it take awhile for the change to show up?

 

No you should only include the robots meta tag if you don't want your page indexed or you don't want your links followed:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">

HTML:

The default is that robots may index your page and follow its links.

 

hi!
btw, meta tags can help you but at the end of the day, its still our site contents and its significance that matters.

 

i took out my meta tag because i thought i went overboard with it, but i will be putting them all back now

 

so when writing a keywords tag are they should they be single words or can they be pharses? Would this be acceptible:

="widget, widget sets, gadget, usa gadgets, canada widgets, stuff, more stuff for you, things,"

Sorry for such a basic question I'm new and I've searched the forum first befor posting.

Thanks for the help.
-ab