Meta tags tutorial

The content on this page is based on SearchEngineNews.com’s e-book Winning The Search Engine Wars.
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Meta tags are non-displayed text written into your HTML document intended to describe your page to the search engine for the purpose of cataloging the content of your page. There are two (and only two) meta tags that are worth including in your web pages: the meta description tag and the meta keyword tag (NONE of the other meta tags have any effect on search engine rankings, whatsoever! …never have and probably never will). The meta description tag is found in your HTML code and looks like this: <meta name=”description” content=”Place Meta Description Text Here - Include Quotation Marks”>. The meta keyword tag is also found in the HTML code and looks like this: <meta name=”keywords” content=”keyword1, keyword2, keyword3, keyword4, etc.”>

Here are the basic rules of thumb regarding your meta tags:

1. Use the meta description tag on all of your optimized web pages.
2. Use only keywords that are relevant to the theme of your site.
3. Be careful to avoid trademark infringement.
4. Limit the number of characters to 250, including spaces and commas (once search engines reach their limit they ignore the rest of the tag’s contents)
5. Place the most important part of your description or keyword tag early, just in case the engine truncates the tag.
6. Avoid repeating keywords in your meta keyword tag.
7. Place commonly misspelled words in the meta keywords tag.

Meta description tags
The meta description tag is useful to describe your page contents to a web browser or search engine; however, it has no appreciable effect on actual search engine rankings. The meta description tag’s importance is that it is used by many search engines as the summary description for your page when your page is listed in the search results. It is often the sub-headline and sales description for your link (your title tag is the headline). It helps the searcher decide whether or not your page is relevant to their search. It’s what compels (or not) a real person to click your link, which is the reason for being listed by the search engine in the first place! If you omit the meta description tag, then the search engine is likely to fabricate a description for your site based on arbitrary text gleaned from somewhere on your page. This could lead to (not so) funny descriptions such as “click to go home” (which is a real-life example). Alternatively, the search engine may omit the summary description altogether if it fails to find something useful within your page to use as a summary. In either case, a potential site visitor is less motivated to click your link if you fail to properly utilize the meta description tag. Hence, in every case where you want a description for your link, be certain to include a relevant and enticing meta description tag. Here is an example of what of a proper use of the meta description tag might look like (for our example let’s imagine that we are optimizing a page which sells cell phone accessories): <meta name=”description” content=”The latest in cell phone accessories at the lowest prices for every known brand of cell phone on the planet!”>.

Meta keyword tag
The only other meta tag that is the slightest bit useful to search engines (and only slightly) is the meta keywords tag. This is because many search engines either ignore it or place only limited value on it because it has been so abused in the past. Here is an example of making good use of the meta keyword tag (again we’ll use cell phone accessories as the subject of our web page): <meta name=”keywords” content=”cell phones, Leather Cases, Cellphone holders, Antennas, antennaes, chargers, batteries, face plates, flashing batteries, hands free head phones, headphones, range extenders, bateries”>.

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This tutorial written by:
Moshe Morris
President of SEMBasics
Chief Research Analyst at Internet Marketing Initiative (www.internetmi.com)

The content on this page is based on SearchEngineNews.com’s e-book Winning The Search Engine Wars.
To learn more about Search Engine News, click here.