People say that the use of meta tags is dead, a useless addition to your website, but are they wrong? Meta tags still serve a useful purpose on all websites. Although not all search engines use these tags, they still contain extremely important information about your website and its content.
Meta tags not only tell a search engine spider about your website, but they also provide instructions that tell the spider what you would like it to do and what you would not like it to do.
First, let’s see what the meta tags tell us about your website:
The first tag in your meta tags should be your title tag, in my opinion this is the most important tag you can control. This tag should indicate your business and no more than 3 keywords that belong to that page. An example of this is
The keyword tag should be next in importance. This tag is pretty straightforward, however there are rules about how many keywords you should have. The general rule of thumb is around 10, but I don’t recommend more than 3 keywords. The reason for this is that the more keywords you have, the harder it is to keep the weighted average where it should be above 54%. Matching site keywords to keyword meta tags is also difficult. An example of this meta tag is
The third in succession should be your description tag, in this tag we want to describe the web page we are on, and again we have another chance to list our 3 keywords for this page. This is important, don’t overlook it. It is also essential to maintain the order in which the keywords appear. An example of this tag is
Now we are at the part of the tags that tell the search engine what you would like it to do with your website. These tags are also critical, as in some cases we can direct the spider through its web pages.
This tag tells the search engine that you would like it to visit your home page, follow all linked pages, and charge for every page you go through. This is important because it allows the engine to store your site in its database.
In this tag we tell the spider to return to our website every 7 days to search for more content. As a web page changes, the content needs to be re-indexed to make it relevant. This tag can help us with this point.
There are many more tags and more detailed information on the above tags, however I just wanted to give an overview of the importance of the above tags.