Hi to all,

Seems I have read many questions about META tags in this forum generally, I found my self free to write an post on that topic in the hope it will be helpful for a lot of guys who found this interesting to read...

Incorrect usage of META tags and other HTML tags as well, is almost harmful as not using them at all. So, it is really important to know to use them correctly. Many people don't really care about META tags, some says that are not even important for SE robots, some people just don't never heard about them... I saw a post somewhere here where some guy says that he tried so many different keywords in his Keyword META tag in last couple hours, but his website still doesn't shows up in Google's search results?! Seems my website offers website-review service, dedicated to SE optimization, I am observing really big amount of HTML codes every day, and its amazing how many websites do NOT have META tags at all. Some even don't have main Title tag! They are really big number!!!


What are Meta tags

META tags are made to provide important information about your website to SE robots, and moreover, how to deal with it. Without, or with incorrect META tags your website would be a bunch of pages which anonymously floating in the middle of internet vacuum. For example, Keyword META tag provides to SE your keywords, which makes connection between search request and search results, Description META tag is used to display description below search result, etc... It's about 8 most common used META tags, but only 2 of them are really important. Description META tag and Keyword META tag. Without them SE spider will have difficulties crawling your website and could leave it unindexed. There's a lot of other reasons why are META tags so important for the website and the SE robots. I'll describe it more specifically in the next lines. I also recommend to use a handy freeware software - METAedit to create your Meta tags correctly.


Most common META tags

Description META tag is used to display a short description, about your website , below the title shown on the top of search result. If you check out Google home page with some search results on it, you will see that's only 2 lines of description shown below the title of the result. It's usually about 15-20 words, or about 160 characters including spaces between them.So, make sure that is clearly described whole website in first 8-10 words of Description tag. From my opinion, that's what ordinary surfer usually reads.
Sample: <META NAME="description" CONTENT="Put your description here.">

Keyword META tag is used by SE robots in order to establish sensible connection between search request and search result. It means basically, if Mike type into Google search bar a simple word "dinner" as a search request, and John, on the other side, has a website which tells, where can you have a good dinner in the town, by putting a word "dinner" in the Keyword Meta tag, SE robot will find John's website and provide it to Mike as a search results. That's why is very important that keywords, which are inside Keyword Meta tag, must be highly relevant with the content of your page. Another important thing si density of the keywords used in the page which should be between 4-8 % of total text in the page. Overuse of keywords, most SE robots defines as keyword forcing, which is one of the common SEO mistakes.
Sample: <META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="keyword1, keyword2, keyword3...">

Robots META tag is used to instruct SE robots to crawl your website, or not , in order to include or exclude pages or files which you don't like to be crawled. It is a bit confusing how to use this Meta tag. No harm if you don't use it at all, because SE robots are set to follow and index by default, but if you want to do inversely, nofollow and noindex, it won't index entire website. So, you need to combine it with a Robots.txt file which instructs SE robots more specifically, by it's Disallow* function, what files, pages or entire folders you want to leave uncrowned and unindexed. Unfortunately, many of SE robots doesn't actually read Robots.txt file. My recommendation on this topic will be, if you don't want your website to be crawled, use nofollow and noindex option, otherwise, use the option shown below in combination with Robots.txt file uploaded in you root folder along with index page of your website.
Sample: <META NAME="robots" CONTENT="INDEX,FOLLOW"> (SE robots default option)
Seems SE robots might not read your Robots.txt file, it would be wise if you specify these orders directly in Robots META tag. Insert the path to the file in CONTENT of Robots META tag along with commands, like this CONTENT="/folder/images/photo.jpg NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW" or if you want uncrowned one type of file then do like this CONTENT=".rar NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW"
Just be very careful how do you use INDEX, NOINDEX and FOLLOW, NOFOLLOW commands. INDEX means - crawl, and FOLLOW means - follow links forward.


This is only 3 examples of most important META tags, but there's about 8 usually used META tags, and near to hundred of other HTML tags...

>> Check it out here... All about META & HTML tags! <<

Snooper

Thanks for the very informative topic, this could be a real resource for the newer players to the web design industry.

Thanx Gollum,

I'm trying to be helpful, because I know how hard it was for me when I have started... I saw a lot of guys here that needs help in web development generally, I'm just gled to be help.

Thanx for your kindly approval.

Snooper