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Written by Huang He Heng. All rights reserved.
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There are several meta tags, but the most important for search engine indexing are the and tag, and another unimportant but useful one is the tag. While for others like author, distribution tags, etc, are not used by search engines, and you are suggested not to use them only if you do think it's necessary. Some may put Title as meta tag, but generally it's not.
Before go ahead, let's clear up one thing, that meta tags are not magic solution. You may have the best meta tags in the world, but meta tags alone will not significantly raise the ranking of your website if it lacks helpful content.
Meta description tag
The meta description tag is in a way to tell the search engines to display the brief and essential description of your site under the title in the search listing, and help the keyword relevancy. The basic html format for meta description tag is:
<meta name="description" content="short description of your website">
This tag is very important, since a magnetic description can arrest searcher's eyes to stop on your listing and hit your link. If no description in your website, search engines will go to your linked page and find any text at the top, and then show it in the listing. Maybe we always find listing in the search result as this:
| Welcome to Commute Taipei Electronics |
| | Home | About Us | Products | Support | Contact Us | . Welcome Commute Taipei Electronics Co., Ltd, we are located... |
| www.commutetp.com/ - 12K - Cached - Similar pages |
This website doesn't have a description tag, so engines put the texts found in the front page and list them in the search result. From this listing, we can only guess that this company has something with electronics, anything else we can't know. Will this listing get a lot clicks? Probably the chance is very low.
Almost all search engines will only give your two lines to display the website description, and the exceeding part will be omitted and replace by "...". Two lines is about 30 words, and try to make your description around 25 words. Spend some time to prepare these 25 words, and they shall tell the searcher what they will find in your website.
Most search engines will consider keywords more important if the keywords exist in the description tag, and the closer to the beginning, the more important. So try to put as more keywords as possible into the description tag and don't locate them at the end in case replaced by "...". However, do remember descriptive and short description is the preferred choice. Let's look at two examples:
Site A: <meta name="description" content="Cornet trading is a trading company located in Ontario, Canada. Our main trading products are Copper Cathode, Mill Berry">
Site B: <meta name="description" content="Copper Cathode, Mill Berry are two main trading products of Cornet trading, which was located in Ontario, Canada">
For site A, keywords "Copper Cathode", "Mill Berry" has the possibility of being cut off by engines, and if this is the case, reader will not know what Cornet are trading for. Site B will tend to do better than site A for the keywords "Copper Cathode", "Mill Berry", because the term occupies more of the overall description, and because they are the first words found in the description.
Though keyword weight is important for the description, repeating keywords is a big no-no. Most search engines will consider this spamming, and readers are unlikely to click a listing like this:
<meta name="description" content="DVD players, portable DVD players, King Bug DVD players, DVD, DVD, DVD">
Searcher can't find a brief description of your DVD players, and thus unlikely to click the link. A description like this will help the site get ignored and un indexed.
that description tag is not a factor in ranking algorithm for most search engines, but it is a factor in alluring clicks.
Meta keywords tag
The meta keywords tag is used to assist those search engines which are meta capable in classing your website. This is important, the search engines use this information to determine under what queries your website will come up. A basic format is as the following:
<meta name="keywords" content="keyword1, keyword2, keyword3,...">
These keywords can be separated commas, space or both, and separation method makes little difference. However inclusion of commas does inflate the tag size, so they can be removed if you are hovering around the limit. Just as a thing has two opposite sides, reciprocally, including commas does have the effect of making the tag much more readable.
You shall put all the keywords and phrases that are important and relevant to your site in the list. Some experts said that some search engines penalize pages that only use one or two words in the tag, and the reason they gave is that engines will treat those pages as doorway pages. Partially right and don't do that. Besides, if you're only using one or two keywords, probably you're going to miss out on traffic by focusing too narrowly. But listing hundreds of keywords dilutes the keyword density, so you won't score well for any of them. My own opinion is to list all your keywords, but if the number exceeds 30, please think about redesigning your website, because even for the most popular sites, they don't have so many keywords.
The keywords listed shall focus on your central information and services. If you are a company designing the shell for DVD players, don't use "DVD" as your keyword because it's a too wide range, instead you can use "Designer of DVD player" as the keyword.
Just as stated in meta description tag, don't repeat the keywords. Never insert the same word twice in a row of the tag, even if you are using different variations (Plurals, Caps, different tense, etc). You can use the same word in different phrases, but never use it more than 3 or 4 times within the keywords tag.
You have 25 keywords and phrases covered all your information and services, but maybe one or two of them are much more important than others. This is where weight and position come into play.
Most search engines will consider keywords more important if the keywords have much more weight and prominence in the tag. In the following example, the weight for keyword "copper" is 25% in site A and 20% in site B.
Site A: <meta name="keywords" content="copper scrap, mill berry">
Site B: <meta name="keywords" content="scrap copper, mill berry, birch">
is how close to the beginning. The closer the beginning, the higher the prominence. In the above example, the prominence for keyword "copper" is 100% in site A and 80% in site B.
Of the above two sites, if the search engine reads meta tags, site A will tend to do better than site B for the keyword "copper". So try to put the most important keywords at the beginning and remove those unrelated words.
Bad news is that though many search engines used to rely on meta keywords tag heavily, more and more have abandoned this or rely less weight on it. No matter using it or not, a good keywords tag can give you a small boost in traffic in many engines, and it's better than nothing.
Meta robots tag
The meta robots tag is used to pass robots or spiders with instructions on what action to take on your pages. Most of the search engines accept robots tag, especially those major ones. The script is as the following, and parameters are one or more words.
<meta name="robots" content="parameters">
The recognized parameters are: index, noindex (counterpart of index), follow, nofollow (counterpart of follow), all, none (counterpart of all).
Most spiders automatically assume that any page they come across can be indexed and links from it can be followed. And you may wonder why somebody wants his page doesn't get indexed. Consider private pages on a site, login page, for example. It's better to put a robots tag with parameters of noindex and none in the <head> part for that kind of pages.
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