What is Meta Tag Optimization?
Meta tags are used in web pages by search engines. Humans do not see them, although the results of meta tag optimization may be indirectly used by people.
If you want to learn how to optimize your own meta tags, the following article will go over meta tags in detail. If you are interested in hiring a profession to analyze your web site or produce meta tags for you, please contact us! We will be happy to help.
Realize that meta tags alone will not get you traffic. Content, is the best traffic magnet you can have. People and search engines alike will reward you because of your content more than your meta tags. Meta tags simply help the search engines do their job, they cannot be used to trick or inflate your ratings.
How are Meta Tags Used?
Meta tags are used two possible ways:
- <META HTTP-EQUIV="name" CONTENT="content">
- <META NAME="name" CONTENT="content">
Meta tags should be placed between the <head> and </head> tags in your header.
Does Every Page Need Meta Tags?
Only the pages you want traffic to need meta tag optimization ( yes, optimize them all ).
Note that each page on your web site should be a specific subject. You'll get much more traffic by separating your web pages into very specific topics. You should not have metatags that try to be everything to everyone, that is not how search engines work!
Can You Put False Information in Meta Tags?
You can, but in the long run you will recieve very little traffic. Once a search engine finds out you are attempting to trick them, you'll get penalized or banned. Also, if you try to use your competitor names you might get sued! It is best to just be honest and have specific pages for each of your products, using meta tags accordingly.
What Metatags Are Required?
Technically, none of the meta tags are required, but if you want to validate your web pages, you'll need the following meta tags:
- charset - <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"> The character set is different for each country, us english uses this one
- keywords - <meta name="keywords" content="separate, keywords, like, this"> Make sure you use the keywords in your article if you put them in the metatags, if not you'll be penalized
- description - <meta name="description" content="Your description should summarize the article, using keywords"> Most search engines only use about 72 characters of your description, but you can put much more in the description
- robots - <meta name="robots" content="index, follow"> Some robots ignore this, but most of them obey it. Tells them to index your site ( a good thing )
- language - <meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en-us"> Helps search engines to know what language your page is in
- pics-label - get your free pics label from icra.org Some search engines penalize for not having a pics label, some parents blocked sites without labels
- script-Type - <META http-equiv="Content-Script-Type" content="text/javascript"> only if you have javascript
What are Other Meta Tags?
- Expires - <META HTTP-EQUIV="expires" CONTENT="Thu, 23 Dec 2004 14:31:57 GMT"> Useful for autoexpiring pages. Needs to be in GMT time as shown.
- Pragma - <META HTTP-EQUIV="PRAGMA" CONTENT="NO-CACHE"> Useful for forcing caching, but relies on browser. Use in conjunction with Cache Control
- cache control - <META HTTP-EQUIV="CACHE-CONTROL" CONTENT="NO-CACHE"> Useful for forcing caching, but relies on browser. Use in conjunction with Cache Control
- Style Type - <META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Style-Type" CONTENT="text/css"> Tells what kind of style sheets you are using
- Refresh - <META HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" CONTENT="3;URL=http://www.example.com/some.html"> Redirects your page after a certain time, most search engines penalize for using this.
- Window Target - <META HTTP-EQUIV="Window-target" CONTENT="_top"> Useful for breaking out of Frames
- MSSmartTags - <META name="MSSmartTagsPreventParsing" content="TRUE"> Microsoft had an idea to hijack all browsers and advertise on them, they have mostly abandoned this idea because of the uproar it caused.
- Robots Cache - <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOARCHIVE"> Tells if you want obedient robots to keep your page in cache ( like google's cache )
- Base - <BASE href="http://digitalcrunch.com/somepage.html"> Used when your page may be copied offsite. Refers back to the original base in the links, instead of the local computer
You can view the source of this document to see how our meta tags are used.