Meta Tags and SEO - What to Use and What Not to Use

**snowmanrene** · 25th Oct 2010, 11:19 AM

So I came across various articles on the web about meta tags etc. And I decided to put them all into one topic.
So we'll talk about Meta tags and their impact on your SEO performance. I'll categorize them into what I feel you should use and which you shouldn't.

What are Meta Tags?
Meta tags are tags written within the <head> section of an HTML document. They were originally developed to help the (at the time) dumb search engines learn what the page was about. In the past meta tags were extremely important; They were used mainly to link your page to common misspellings of your target keywords (For example, if someone searched sNo or snowmanrene when looking for me). Nowadays search engines are a lot smarter, they automatically correct misspellings, and they can learn what a page is about from the content alone.

On top of that, a common black-hat SEO practice was to stuff your meta tags with popular keywords that are irrelevant to your site in hopes of gaining some traffic. For these reasons Meta Tags are typically not useful for SEO. However, when used correctly they can help your site! This tutorial contains the two tags you should use, and how to use them, and all the other tags you may have been curious about!

Note that most of these are useless and a waste of time to use! Also note that these tags are written in XHTML! (self closing tags)

Meta Tags you should use on your site
Keywords <meta name="keywords" content="webmaster, resource, discussion, community" />
This tag describes the keywords linked with your webpage. This is one of the important ones that you should use.

You must exercise caution using this tag. Make sure the keywords you enter are related, and present in the content of the page. i.e. if your page is about dog training, don?t include keywords about porn. You should use around 4-6, with a MAXIMUM of 10 common separated and specific keywords (don?t be broad!).

Should I use it? YES

Description <meta name="description" content="A webmaster discussion community" />
This tag is one of the most important meta tags. It will not necessarily impact your SEO, it will however impact your click through rate. Your click through rate, or CTR is a measurement of how many people see your link and decide to click it.

A coherent and well written description will make your link much more appealing to click. To use this tag effectively, write a description using words and keywords present on your page.If you do this correctly, search engines will use the description in the meta tag in the search results. Keep the description less that 40 words, mine is 15.

Should I use it? YES

Meta Tags you may want to use on your site
Robots <meta name="ROBOTS" content="attributes" />
This tag was developed for webmasters unable to upload a robots.txt file. Attributes can be replaced with one or more of the following: noindex, nofollow, noarchive, all, index, or follow.

Should I use it? Using the tag with the index, follow, or all attributes is unnecessary. A search engine will index your whole site unless you tell it not to. With that said, if you do not want the search engine spider to crawl your page, and you cannot upload a robots.txt, by all means use it!

Content Type <meta name="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
This tag tells what the content type of the web page is, for example the page this post is on is written in text and html so we would use the text/html type. The charset is up to you of course depending on whether or not you need special characters. I recommend UTF-8, it is an extremely versatile charset that should meet all your needs.

Should I use it? It is unnecessary unless you need a special character from a specific charset. This tag does not impact your SEO. If you do not include this tag, the users browser will use it?s default charset.

Cache Control <meta http-equiv="Cache Control" content="no-cache" />
Most browsers will automatically cache (or save) parts of a website to the computer to save loading times. This meta tag instructs it not to. This tag does not impact your SEO.

Should I use it? Only use this on a page that is frequently updated.

Content Language <meta name="content-language" content="en" />
This tag states the language of the web page, English in this case. Very useful in the past, not so useful now. Most search engines are so sophisticated that not only can they detect the language of the page, they will translate it for you. The codes for different languages can be found at this website.

Should I use it? This tag is useful if your site is in multiple languages, you can specify on each page what language it is on. Otherwise save the line, the search engine will automatically detect your site?s language.

Meta Tags you should NOT use!
Audience <meta name="audience" content="all" />
This tag is intended for parental control software. Once again parental control software has gotten smarter since this tag has been implemented, and they can figure out which pages are bad or not without the tag. Other substitutes for ?all? include: general, mature, adult?

Should I use it? No this tag is seldom utilized and you may as well save a line of code.

Author <meta name="author" content="sNo mAn"
This tag states the author of the web page. What software utilizes this tag? I don?t know to be honest. Many people like to have this tag on the page just so they can claim is as theirs.

Should I use it? This tag is another seldom used and largely unnecessary tag. You may as well save a line of code and not include it in your documents.

Generator <meta name="GENERATOR" content="Microsoft FrontPage 4.0" />
This tag states what software generated the page. The software can be anything from WYSWIG editors to wordpress. Mainly an advertisement for the software.

Should I use it? I suggest deleting it, if you want to keep your editors brand on your page then keep it.

Page Topic <meta name="page-topic" content="website discussion, problems, tips, opinions" />
This tag described the main theme of your site. Not used by many search engines and does not improve your SEO.

Should I use it? Not necessary but up to you.

Page Type <meta name="page-type" content="Article" />
Describes the type of page. Not used by many, if at all any search engines whatsoever.

Should I use it? No.

ProgramID <meta name="ProgID" content="FrontPage.Editor.Document" />
Type of program used to edit the file. Similar to the generator. Essentially it is an advertisement for your program.

Should I use it? I suggest deleting it, but if you want to support your editor go ahead and keep it.

Publisher <meta name="publisher" content="AdminSpot.net" />
Publisher of the web page.

Should I use it? Nope.

Revisit After X <meta name="revisit-after" content="15 days" />
This tag is a hint as to when the spider should re-index your site. This tag was developed for a Vancouver search engine called search B.C., and is not supported by any major search engines.

Should I use it? No.

So I hope this has been useful for you. If it has, please say thanks

snowmanrene Reviewed by snowmanrene on 25th Oct 2010. Meta Tags and SEO - What to Use and What Not to Use So I came across various articles on the web about meta tags etc. And I decided to put them all into one topic. So we'll talk about Meta tags and their impact on your SEO performance. I'll categorize them into what I feel you should use and which you shouldn't. What are Meta Tags? Meta tags are tags written within the <head> section of an HTML document. They were originally developed to help the (at the time) dumb search engines learn what the page was about. In the past meta tags were Rating: 5

**hatem20** · 25th Oct 2010, 11:32 AM

Useful information. Thanks for sharing!

**FinalQuality** · 4th Nov 2010, 01:47 PM

Really useful, this should help every webmaster.

**snowmanrene** · 25th Jan 2011, 04:56 PM

Your welcome

**Anthonis** · 25th Jan 2011, 05:05 PM

good info and so clearly

**Hillside** · 27th Jun 2011, 04:04 AM

huwaw... thanks

**devilboy23** · 6th Jul 2011, 02:53 PM

hey, is it good to use these in header?

<meta name="robots" content="all"/><meta name="robots" content="INDEX, FOLLOW">

i already setup robots.txt to protect directories/folders.

**minhchick** · 10th Jul 2011, 05:01 PM

thank you
useful thread

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