Meta tags: what’s it all about?
Meta tags are read by browsers and search engines, you won’t see them on a web page unless you click view source. There are three main kinds of meta tags that people normally obsess over.
- <title>Meta tags: what’s it all about</title> - this is the tag that generates the page title that appears in your browser bar. I’d say the page title is about the most important semantic location for your entire page. If you’re targeting a keyword like ‘arthritis pain relief‘, you’d want ‘arthritis pain relief‘ in the title, but don’t forget to make the rest of the page about ‘arthritis pain relief’. Google’s looking for good content, and the page title should correlate with all other content on the page. [notice that Word Press with Permalinks switched on is generating a url with the page title included in the URL - these friendly URLs are also an important aid]
- <meta name=”description” content=”Baldy’s Blog is the definitive and accessible guide to the latest SEO and Adword techniques”> I don’t think (and I’m happy to be corrected) that meta description makes any difference to your weighting in Google, but the meta description is normally used as the description in Google’s search results. So, if you’ve written a good meta description, you’re likely to get a better click-through rate (CTR). A better CTR = more traffic = a higher ranking.
Note, your meta description must match the content of the page, and must only use the vocabulary found on the page. Anything else, will signal spam.
- <meta name=”keywords” content=”SEO, SEM, Google, Adwords, Baldy” />. In the old days you could slam your meta keywords full of anything, and it would deliver traffic. Meta keywords very vital in the days when searchbots couldn’t digest the content of pages. But they can now, and in my view you can forget meta keywords. If you do feel tempted to use them, make sure the keywords absolutely reflect the page’s content.
June 24, 2008 | Filed Under Google, Organic Listings
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