CBSE NCERT Homework Help: Meta Tags Optimization

There used to be a time when the contents of a pages Meta Tags was very important, it was around about the same time the Berlin Wall was still standing!! Today meta tags hold little value to Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

What Are Meta Tags? Way, way back when that wall was still upright search engine algorithms were so dumb they couldn’t work out what a page was about just from the content. So some bright spark had the ingenious idea to create a set of tags (meta tags) that inferred information about a pages content to the search engines.

Meta tags are lines of HTML code added into web pages that are utilized by search engines to bank information about your website. The standard Meta Tags are the keyword Meta Tag, the description Meta Tag, and the Title tag, which exist in approximately every web page. These Meta Tags, oftenly called as 'Tags', store meta data including keywords, keyphrases, descriptions, site author information, copyright information, site titles and other details. There are other important Meta Tags as well, which is why Meta tag optimization must be part of any web site optimization service. Meta Tags are among the several factors that the search engines look for, that any search engine optimization strategy needs to keep on top of.

Meta tags are incorporated in the 'HEAD' Tag of an HTML document. If you are using meta tags to Boost your Rankings in search engines, then you should concentrate on your description and keywords. Great idea, except there was nothing to stop a webmaster stuffing or spamming their Meta Tags with irrelevant, but very high traffic keywords and keyword phrases. Which of course they did with enthusiasm, you would find adult sites using words like Disney and Pokemon in their Keywords Meta Tag for the traffic!! Today the vast majority of meta tags are worthless and those that are still considered by search engines aren’t worth that much. For example Google confers no benefit from any meta tags, so if you expect a high Google ranking from perfectly optimised keywords in your meta tags, don’t hold your breath.

Which Meta Tags Should You Use?

For Google adding the Description Meta Tag won’t result in a boost in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), but the description might be used for the description for your SERP listings in Google. So though you won’t get a ranking boost, if your write an interesting Description Meta Tag and Google uses it (not guaranteed), you might get a higher click through rate compared to a random snippet of text from your pages. All other meta tags (including the Keywords Meta Tag) are either completely ignored or won’t result in a SERPs boost.

Yahoo says they use the Keyword Meta Tag when it ranks a page. So it makes sense to add one for Yahoo and any other minor search engines that still use. Also there are directories and other websites that automatically take this information to create a listing to your site. Don’t fret over it though, add the main phrase for that page to the Keywords Meta Tag and user friendly description of the page to the Description Meta Tag and forget about it.

Use the title tag and description tag to define what your page signifies. Search engines that use it will supply the content of title tag and description tag while displaying a list of links. For example, if you do a search on Google, you will find the description listed on the search results page.

The keywords tag :

Keywords help search engines to categorize your site, and allow people to find speedily your page. However, most search engines have limits as to how many Meta Keywords are viewed. It is suggested to review your keywords and ensure that they are concise and specific. Implementing these tags aptly is crucial to generate high rankings. The most significant aspect of meta-tags is that search engines pay a lot of importance to them and hence they have come to be widely accepted in the SEO process.

Meta tag optimization must be included as only a part of the overall SEO strategy. It is critical to first pay close attention to your website architecture and content strategy. If the search engine spiders cannot find your pages and your Meta tags do not support the content on the page, each Meta tag will be meaningless. “Most SEO Experts rank the page title as the most important element to optimize in order to build authority for the primary keyword on the page.”

Example Meta Tags :

Below you will find an example set of meta tags. This is for a page you want fully indexed in all search engines.

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd”>

<TITLE>SEO Tutorial – Meta Tags Optimization</TITLE>

</HEAD>

<body>

The DOCTYPE-

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd”>

Is the DOCTYPE, it’s not a meta tag and it’s not essential you add this to a page for good search engine placement, but if you want a page to validate in a HTML validator (i.e. http://validator.w3.org/) you’ll need to add the right one.

The TITLE-

<TITLE>SEO Tutorial – Meta Tags Optimization</TITLE>

Again this isn’t a meta tag, but it’s sometimes referred to as a meta tag by those who don’t fully understand meta tags. The title element is very, very important to a pages optimisation, which is why we have an entire page dedicated to Title Optimization. The title should include the most important phrase for that page and possibly one or two highly relevant keywords to create related phrases. The one above helps several important phrases including Meta Tags Optimization, Meta Tags, Meta Tags Tutorial, SEO Tutorial, SEO Meta Tags etc…. Don’t go over the top with adding lots of keywords, keep it short and sweet so each word gets a reasonable boost and don’t forget potential visitors (they have to read it).

The DESCRIPTION META TAG-

As covered earlier in Google the contents of the description meta tag will not have an impact on the pages search engine rankings, but may be used as the description in the search results. So be descriptive, think about what a potential visitor might click on not keyword stuffing.

The KEYWORDS META TAG-

Of no value to Google and probably little value to other major search engines. Easiest way to fill this meta tag is by pasting the same contents as the TITLE minus anything you added for visitors to read. In the example above we removed “SEO Tutorial – ” because that is there for visitors who read the TITLE element as part of a search engine listing.

The Character Set and links external files-

Not meta tags and will have no impact on a pages search engine placement, the Character set is used by browsers so the right set of characters are used to display your page. Don’t add one and the browser will use its default (it will guess), this might mean your page doesn’t look right to a visitor. External style sheets (CSS files) and external javascript (JS files) are referenced here. Again no impact on SEO, but if you can push some javascript or markup off your page you should. It saves bandwidth and means your pages load faster.

Meta tag optimization MUST be included as part of any good search engine optimization services but if your SEO efforts end here don’t expect to get great rankings.

See Videos

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9EyV15yclE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2A_EHybQQM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKDfN-9X1zA

Regards,

Preeti Bagad [BE(CS)]

SW Engineer Cum Blogger

On Line Assistence :