Wed, 29 Aug 2007 15:37:13 by Craig Wilson
Meta tags are way to give your page properties that don't affect the website from a user's point-of-view but can change the way your page is handled by a search engine spider. There are many different Meta tags, although many are now obsolete and the rest are generally used for the wrong purpose. Understanding your Meta tags is important for any SEO firm. There are a few out there that can benefit any marketing campaign which I will be covering in this post. I'll be splitting them in to categories: essential, useful, dangerous and useless.
Essential Meta Tags
Title
<title>Page Description Goes Here</title>
Your title tag is the single most important tag on any page. It should briefly describe the content on the page and follow with your brand name if desired. Page titles should be different on every page; this can be the difference between falling into Google's supplemental pages or a high long-tail ranking.
Description
<meta name="description" content="Page description goes here" />
Similar to your title tag, this should also describe the page's content but in a little more detail. This is the text you see in search engine result pages and is a factor in attracting a user to click on your ranking.
Useful Meta Tags
Keywords
<meta name="keywords" content="Page keywords go here" />
This is a tag that has been declining in importance for a few years now. Due to abuse, many search engines now either completely ignore this tag or place less emphasis on it than they did 5 years ago. However, at this point in time it's still worth including on every page, they may not have a lot of influence but they don't do any harm.
Language
<meta http-equiv="content-language" content="en-GB" />
This tag helps define the website's language to reinforce the country you are targeting towards. Google is smart enough to identify this information without this tag, although it may help if you have a UK website that is hosted abroad.
Dangerous Meta Tags
Refresh
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="3; url=http://www.example.com/" />
This tag shouldn't be used without good reason to. Search engines don't like Meta refreshes due to their history of abuse amongst spammers. If you are redirecting one page to another then you should be using either a permanent 301 redirect or a temporary 302 redirect. Both are search engine friendly and using a Meta refresh will hurt your rankings.
Expire
<meta http-equiv="expires" content="Thu, 30 Aug 2007 00:00:00 GMT" />
The expire tag tells search engines when they should consider your page out-of-date and no longer active. At this point, the page will be dropped from the search engine's index. This tag is useful for when you're running a promotional page that expires on a specific date, for example. Using it improperly, however, may see your pages dropped from the search engines at your expense.
Useless Meta Tags
Revisit
<meta name="Revisit-After" content="7 days" />
The revisit tag is to inform the search engine spider to return to the website. Ideally, you would have it set to match the frequency of updates to that page. In the real world, however, spiders most likely ignore this tag. They'll visit your page as often or as little as they'd like and there's nothing you can do about it. The good news is that spiders are smart enough to get a good idea of how often the page really does get updated. So the only rule you need to remember here is: the more you update your website, the more frequently your pages will be indexed.
Copyright and Author
<meta name="copyright" content="Copyright 2007 Your Company" />
<meta name="author" content="Your Name" />
I see these two tags being used a lot these days, but they don't actually provide any help to search engines, browsers or users. In fact, their only use is to stroke the ego of your web designer. These extra lines of code contribute nothing but wasted space, which means less of your actual content being crawled by the search engines.
Craig Wilson
Campaign Delivery Manager |
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