Meta Tags in Plain English
// March 5th, 2010 // No Comments » // Code, For Geeks, SEO, Useful, Wordpress, web tools, webdesign, webmaster
Meta-tags are used by search engines to correctly index and rank web sites. The most important meta tags are the keywords meta tags and the description meta tags and both are essential for any well-built site.
When you create a website and you submit it to the search engines, the search engines “spiders” are sent out to “crawl” the site and attempt to correctly index it based on the information it provides. They do this based on several things including the keywords in the content and in the meta tags. Each search engine indexes web sites according to their own algorithms. Some place emphasis on the description tag, such as AltaVista. Other search engines, like Exactseek, are meta tag purists, as stated in their user policy: “Your site will not be added if it does not have Title and Meta description tags.”
Recently, some search engines have downplayed the importance of meta tags due to spam. Some SEO “specialists” were keyword stuffing their tags with irrelevant information, just to get traffic. To penalize this abuse, some search engines don’t assign too much weight to the keywords in meta tags, but they still check to make sure they are relevant.
Fact: All major search engines including Google, Yahoo!, Scrub The Web, MSN Bing and others utilize Meta Tags!
If you’re visiting or worse paying search engine optimization sites that claim Meta Tags including the Meta Description are not used by the major search engines and the meta tag isn’t important anymore.. Run away, don’t walk but you don’t have to take my word for it, just visit Google™ or Yahoo!® and see what they have to say about Meta Tag optimization.
Bottom line.. either way, if you don’t have meta tags, or your meta tags are stuffed with irrelevant keywords, you won’t rank well in the search engines.
Avoid using capitalization in your code, as well as any repetition within the keyword tag. The meta tag description is displayed by most search engines along with the page title. It is important to keep the meta description short, concise and relevant to your site content. I suggest under 30-40 words. (up to a maximum of 250 characters).
Recommendations for the Meta Keywords tag: Make sure to only use keywords that are relevant to your site. Search engines are known to penalize or blacklist your site for abuse.
MOST IMPORTANT: Put the same keywords that you put your meta tag in your website content! If the keywords aren’t already included within the body text in sufficient density, and in a coherent and relevant context then it won’t matter what keyword tags you use or where you put them. You won’t rank well and you may be penalized for keyword stuffing.
Without a doubt, content is still king and still the biggest contributor to search engine page ranking, so if you want to raise your rankings, make sure you have quality content.
I recommed using a Meta Tag generator like Scrub the Web or Addme.com to create the Meta Tag. If you need help learning how to insert the Meta tag into your Wordpress hosted website click here.
For more information read How To Dial In Your Keywords and Making Friends With The Spider.
In the default installation, WordPress does not include meta tags such as description and keywords. So you must insert this yourself.
Using Meta Tag Plugins allow you to customize meta tags, and to choose the ones you want to add, or not, on a per-post basis. This allows your meta information to better describe each page.
OK..Now that I’m done researching this post.. I need to go re-do my meta tags. Well at least I have a meta tag!! The scary thing is I give financial advisors SEO and meta tag advice all day while I completly neglect my own meta tags. Bad, bad Webmaster!
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