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META TAGS OPTIMIZATION
WHAT ARE META TAGS?
Meta tags are the information inserted in <HEAD> area of the HTML code of your website, where apart from the
title tag, other information is not visible to the person surfing your website but it's intended for the search engine
crawlers.
SOME EXAMPLES...
A TYPICAL META TAG WOULD LOOK AS GIVEN BELOW:
<HEAD><TITLE>This is the Web Page Title. </TITLE>
<META name="description" content="This is where you place your web page's description.">
<META name="keywords" content="place, your, keywords, here, separated, by, commas"></HEAD>
Typical meta tags are "keywords" and "description"
Using meta tags in your HTML code is not necessary. There are many website that don't feel the requirement
to use meta tags at all.
WHY ARE META TAGS USED?
Meta tags were originally designated to provide web masters with a way to help search engines know the content of a website. This in turn helped the search engines decide how to rank the sites in their search
results.
As competition increased, web masters started manipulating this tool through spamming of keywords. In turn, most search engines withdrew their support to Meta keywords Tag, which included Lycos and AltaVista
TYPES OF META TAGS
THE TITLE TAG• The title tag is not a meta tag. It's an HTML code that shows the words that appear at the top of your browser. It is not displayed anywhere else on the page.
• Search engines use your Title Tag to gather information about your site. Therefore, it's significance is evident.
• Title tag should announce the the summary of the content of the page
• You should put the product, or the service you are offering in the Title Tag.
• Google usually reads about 90 characters of your title tag, so leverage this length to cover important keywords that are relevant to the page.
THE META DESCRIPTION TAG
• The MDT is HTML code that allows you to give a brief and concise summary of the content of your page.
• The words placed in this tag are often used in the Search Engines Result Pages (SERP). So, in SERP, after reading the title of your website, a user goes through the description of a Mage and decides if he/she wants to visit your website.
• In case you don't provide MDT, the search engine will try to make one for you by using the first few keywords of your web content.
• The MDT should be written in a creative way to get the interest of a user.
• The MDT shall be different and customized on each of your pages /HTML/ documents.
THE META KEYWORD TAG
• Most of the search engines do not read the MKT anymore, so it is totally OK to ignore it. If you decide to use it, you can always put up to 15 important keywords that shall be separated by commas.
• <meta name="keywords" content="Internetmarketing, SEO, Socialmedia" />
META ROBOTS TAG
• The MRT helps you to specify whether search engines shall index a page or follow the links appearing on that page
• There is no need for using MRT if one is already using a detailed robots.txt file to block any specific indexing. (for more info on robots.txt look at my previous lecture)
• The various commands used under MRT are index,non index,follow and nofollow : <meta name="robots" content="index, follow"> <meta name="robots" content="all">
META REFRESH TAG• This tag is used to redirect a visitor from one page to another or refresh the page in a specific time.
• When inserted into an HTML document, it causes the user's browser to load the same or a new web page after a specific number of seconds.
• To refresh the current page: <HEAD><meta http-equiv="refresh" content="40"> </HEAD>
• To redirect to another page: : <HEAD><meta http-equiv="refresh" content="4;URL=http://www.madamseo.com"> </HEAD>
• Using Meta Refresh Tag to redirect to another page is likely to get it dropped from search engines, since this method is considered as a doorway in search engines algorithm.
META DISTRIBUTION TAG
• This tag identifies the levels of distribution of your webpage and how it shall be classified in the context of the world wide web.
• 'Global' specifies that your website is for mass distribution
• 'Local' let's you specify that your document is for local distribution only.
• Example: <META name="Distribution" content="Global">
OTHER META TAGS
• Meta Author Tag - identifies the author of a particular web site
• Meta Revisit Tag - specifies how often a search engine crawlers shall visit a web page for re-indexing
• Copyright Meta Tag
• Language Meta Tag
• Ratings Meta Tag - tells the search engines if your site is for general or restricted adult audiences.
CHEERS :)
