Webmaster Tip - How to write good meta tags

Meta Tags

Basically Meta Tags are used by search engines to work out what your site is about and how to display that to people who search for your site. They will not guarantee good placement in the search engines, but they are now used by all except one major search engine. So if you don't have good Meta Tags, you are doing your website a disservice.

Placement of Meta Tags

META tags are best placed in the head of the HTML document between the tags, and before the BODY tag. Make sure you also include them on each individual framed page. If you use META tags only on the frameset pages, you might be missing out on traffic!

Useful Tags

Description Tags

Make sure you add your own description for your pages - Use the META description attribute:

<name="description" content="This blog is about tips for webmasters, including things like SEO, web hosting......etc.">

Use around 60 - 130 characters, and include a few of your keywords in the description.

Keywords tag

Keywords are how visitors find your site so they are obviously very important very and it is important you get them right.

<name="keywords" content="webmaster, SEO, increase traffic, etc,">

You can use 800 characters when writing a description tag. Include the most important keywords at the top. Don't repeat the same keyword to generate more results as most search engines ignore the spam. However, you can include keywords in both the singular and plural form.

Robot Tags

Robots are what the search engines send out to look over your pages and find out what it is about. This tag tells those robots what to do.

<name="robots" content="all / none / index / noindex / follow / nofollow">

Robot attribute:

"all" - This allows all of the files to be indexed.

"None" - tells the spider not to index any files and not to follow any hyperlinks

"Index" - Tells the spider that this page may be indexed

"follow" - The spider is free to follow the links from this page to other pages.

"noindex" - Tells the spider that this page may not be indexed, but allows it to follow the hyperlinks and index those pages.

"nofollow" Tells the spider that this page may be indexed, but the links should not be followed.

Distribution tag

<name="distribution" content="Global">

You can also tell the robots how you want the pages indexed. The options are global, or restricted to certain countries.

Rating Tag

<name="rating" content="General">

This helps the robots classify your site, you can assign a rating to your pages:

Revisit Tag

<name="revisit after" content="30days">

If you update your site often it is useful to ask the spiders to revisit your site after a certain time. The recommended time is between 21 and 180 days.

Hopefully these simple tips will help you write better meta tags and get more visitors to your website!

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