Before I start, I need to say something. If the only thing you do for your clients is to optimize META tags and TITLE tags, please stop saying that you’re providing SEO services (or Internet marketing services). SEO is way, way more than that.
The meta tag is accompanied by the name attribute. There are many values that can be used under the name (or http-equiv) attribute of the META element, but not all of them can influence search engine decisions. Without getting into details about every attribute (one could write entire articles for each meta tag) let’s start with a simple one:
The Good Meta Tags
KEYWORDS
Most of the SEO expert will cry out loud: “you’re darn stupid” to consider the keywords tag useful. Don’t judge judge me for putting it in the list of the good meta tags until you read below, about how you could use this tag and spin it in something useful for searchers and search engines. Sure, this one doesn’t deserve the head of the list in terms of importance, but there’s been lot’s of debate around it and I wanted to get over it fast. But, there are a couple of things that you need to know about it:
1. Major search engines (Google, Yahoo!, and Bing) don’t use the content of the keywords meta tag to rank pages.
2. Small search engines and vertical engines might still use it.
My advice is to still have unique keywords meta tags for each page of your website; they won’t hurt you. Just don’t spend too much time on generating them. Keep the tag below 15 keywords and make sure that the keywords you list inside are actually present in the main body text of the page.
Here’s a very nice spin for this tag: repeat keywords from this tag into page tags clouds; duplicate your keywords from the keywords meta tag somewhere on the page into tags. Your tags can be related searches performed on your internal site search.
DESCRIPTION
This is probably the single most important piece of meta data you can provide to a search engine. It’s bots’ food. If the content is wisely crafted and relevant to the page content search engines will display its content as the snippet below the blue page title
If a search query and a web page are a positive match within search engines’ database, AND the searched words are NOT present within the DESCRITPION meta tag, search engines will use the description tag to create the snippet, but instead they will replace the snippet with some content on the page, or the description from DMOZ or Yahoo! Directory.
Very briefly, here’s something that you need to know about the DESCRIPTION meta tag:
- Place the targeted keyword as close as possible to the beginning (keyword prominence)
- Keep the # of chars below 150 and above 25, including spaces
- Don’t start the tag with your brand name
- Write unique descriptions for each page
- Don’t repeat the page title inside this tag
- Don’t use any of the following special characters in description text: ‘ ” < > { } [ ] ( )
CONTENT-LANGUAGE
This one is still important especially for multi language websites. Use it in the head of the page to help search engines correctly identify the language the page’s content is written in. To identify the language a web page is written in, search engines don’t rely solely on the existence of this tag. But it’s always a good idea to provide additional clues.
CONTENT-TYPE
This one can be used to specify the language and character encoding of the document. content-type tag does not impact your search engine rankings and if you do not include it, the users browser will fall back to its default charset. Use it on multi language/charset web sites.
AUTHOR
This one seems to become more and more important. Google is now supporting the rel=”author” attribute on LINK tags.
If you want to make sure you’re credited as the original author of a piece of content use this meta data within your META tags too
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