Using Meta Tags

There is some debate amongst search engine optimization (SEO) professionals as to how important meta tags are these days. In the early years of the Internet meta tags were seen as a quick key to success. Search engines weighted meta tags heavily in determining search placement for websites. Meta tags weigh was high enough that their use was widely abused and has since led to less serious of an importance placed on them.

How to Setup Up Meta Tags

There are many different meta tags that are used by people. For the sake of simplicity I suggest you focus on two of them: keywords and description. Both are fairly self explanatory, keywords is used as a listing of keywords related to the web page and description is used for a short description of the web page. These tags are placed at the top of a web page's code immediately after the html title tag.

Keywords

For keywords, select between 15 and 25 keywords that you hope people will find your site when searching for. For example, if your website is about your favorite new music then your keywords tag might look something like this:

<meta name="keywords" content="music, new music, music reviews, new songs, rock music, pop music, country music, top ten songs, new cds, number one song, number 1 song">

Description

For the description meta tag you need to write a 200-250 word description of your website. Some search engines will use this description of your site in their search results so make sure that it makes sense and uses proper grammar. Again, if your website is about your favorite new music your description tag might look something like this:

<meta name="description" content="Reviews of the latest new music in multiple genres such as rock music, pop music, country music and other new music.">

One Final Meta Tag - Robots

The only other meta tag even worth mentioning is the robots tag. Properly used it will look exactly like this:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex">
The robots tag is used to indicate to a search engine if you wish for a certain page to not be indexed by the engine, hence the "noindex". You do not need to use this tag to tell a search engine to index a page, without the robots tag your page will get indexed.

The Bottom Line

Only some of the major search engines use them and their weight is low but since it only takes a few minutes to set them up its worth it. Don't count on your meta tags to do much for you but they can't really hurt.

tags: meta tags