What are meta tags and why do I need them? Print

  • 1

There are three important Meta Tags that every web page needs in order to be included in most search engines.

  1. Title
  2. Description
  3. Keywords

The following three pieces of code are to be put between html head tags in your page.

<head>
Put code here
</head>

Title

Not a meta tag, but the most important for search engines to read.

<title> put your page title here, up to 10 words </title>


Description

The description tag is used by about half of the major search engines (with the other half showing an excerpt from the page). It is a short summary of the content of the page.

<meta name="description" content="This page is about France, with particular emphasis on baguettes">

Your description needs to include some of your best keywords (as these are highlighted in the results), but it must also stay readable to a person. If your descriptions are just a list of keywords few people will click on to your link. You have to write with a balance between keywords and promotion.

 

Keywords

Keywords are the words people will type in to a search engine. If the keywords you have chosen are the same as the ones they have put in, you come up in the search engine's results pages. How high up you are depends on your ability to pick good words and use a few tricks. First, the code:

<meta name="keywords" content="france, europe, francais, french, la baguette">

You just add in your words, separated by commas (although these aren't necessary). You can put in as many as you want, but I would advise against more than 25-30. Many search engines regard pages with hundreds of keywords as spam pages, and delete them from their indexes, and you don't want that.

Picking your keywords is the trick. You should use the words you personally would use if you were looking for a page about your topic. A good idea is to use key phrases instead of just words on their own.


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