Meta Tags, The Simple Guide
Jan 17th, 2008 by George
Meta tags are essential for SEO and good search engine results. When done correctly, they can help to increase your placing in search engines, which in turn will increase your traffic, and then, probably, your income, either from advertising or sales. However, when they are done incorrectly, they can be the downfall of a website, so I made this simple guide to explain it, and make it easier for those who don’t quite understand it :)
The first, and most important thing to understand is the structure. It’s very simple, but this is where the majority of errors occur:
<META name=”metatype” content=”whatever”/>
These are placed in the <head> section of your website, just below <title>(yoursitetitle)</title> ; and there are various type of META information you can show, here are two of the most important:
Description : This is a simple description of your website, and it should be included in any sites tags, it’s a fundamental.
<META name=”description” content=”This website is about this, and was written by him, featuring this that and the other.”/>
Keywords : The second fundamental. This is very important, you need to place keywords that relate to your website here, like blog,advertising, laptops and similar
<META name=”keywords” content=”gpearce, george pearce, technology, blog, tutorials, photoshop, web design”/>
By now, you should understand the structure, it’s really pretty simple, and if you are in any doubt, use the validator at validator.w3.org to check up on how things are going :)
Some Tips and Tricks
1. Don’t include too many keywords, Google doesn’t take kindly to this
2. Keep your description short, sweet and unique
3. Try to use unique keywords, they will be what you are most likely to be found under on Google or similar.
Hope this helps, please contact me if there are any problems :)
-G