Meta Tags Back to Article It is important to give information about your pages and content directly to visiting spiders and bots. Providing meta-tags in the <head> portion of your pages does this. The most critical meta-tags are title, keywords, description and robots. The title tag should be approximately 15 words and clearly indicate the content of the page. Be sure to include one or two keywords from the body content of the page in the title. This way the search engines can draw a correlation between the title and content. Most search engines will also use the title meta-tag as the link text in the search results. If the title meta-tag does not exist, the search engines will use some random text from your page or just your URL as the title, which in most cases is not the best title for your page. The keywords tag should consist of up to 25 words or groups of words separated by commas that indicate the subject of your page; use both singular and plural when applicable. Do not duplicate the same keyword over and over, this is called search engine spamming, it will not help and can get you banned from a search engine index. Because of such tactics, search engines are putting less and less value on the keywords tag and in some cases they ignore them altogether. But it is a good practice to include this tag anyway for the search engines that still utilize it. The keywords "toy duck, toy ducks, rubber duck, rubber ducks, toy, toys" would be more effective for a page containing content about rubber ducks than "rubber ducks, rubber ducks, rubber ducks, rubber ducks" or "lots of rubber ducks, rubber ducks for your tub, rubber toys". Be sure that the keywords you select appear in the content of the page as it helps the search engines draw a correlation between them and your page content. The description tag should have approximately a 25-word description of your page in plain English. Be sure to include the main keyword in this description, this way the search engines can once again draw a correlation between the title and content. Search engines will display this page description in search results if it exists, otherwise they will use some random text from your as the description, which in most cases is not best describe your page. And finally, the robots tag gives directives to the visiting spiders and bots, telling them what to do with the content of the page. This way you can choose which pages are added to the search indexes. To have spiders and bots index the content of a page and follow all links use the following... <meta name="robots" content="index,follow"> To prevent spiders and bots from indexing the content of a page and following all links use the following... <meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow"> These directives can be used in combination to allow spiders and bots to index your page content but prevent spiders from following links on the page with the following... <meta name="robots" content="index,nofollow"> |
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