Meta Tags Optimisation Tutorial
Want to get your website higher in the search results from a search engine? Then the best way is by the correct use of Meta tags.
As 95% people using search engines only look at the top 20 search results, it is important to get your website as high as possible.
Several meta tags where introduced by the popular search engines, Infoseek and AltaVista, to help there search engines index web pages, most now use meta tags to index pages.
If you want your website indexed then consider using Meta tags.
Meta tags go in the head of your web page, in-between the HTML tags, <head> and </head>.
There are a number of different Meta tags that you can use, but the most important ones are the Description and the Keywords Meta tags as well as having a title for the web page.
Title
The title of your web page should also be in the document head and is the mot important 'non content' part of your page as it carries the most weighting with search engines. You should keep this below 60 characters and include your most important keywords first, if you have a company of brand name then it is often better to palace this at the end after your most important keywords for the page.| <title>Meta Tags Optimisation Tutorial - Web Wiz SEO Article</title> | ||
Description
This tag is often used by search engines for the description of your web page. It will not affect the ranking or indexing of your web page, so think of it as an advert for your page and write your description as a short ad of under 160 characters to encourage people to view your page.| <meta name= "description" content="Tips on how to optimise your Meta Tags to get your website higher in search engine results." /> | ||
Keywords
To help get your website up in the ratings you can supplement the title and description with a list of keywords, separated by commas, that some one might type into a search engine when looking for a site like yours. Google will ignore keywords meta tags, but other search engines do use this to help index your website.| <meta name="keywords" content="meta tags,tutorial,training,html" /> | ||
Rating
This is used to give the web page a rating for the appropriateness for kids. The ratings are, general, mature, restricted, and 14 years.| <meta name="rating" content="general" /> | ||
The rest of the tags are not necessary but I shall run through them anyway.
Author
This is used to identify the author of the web page.| <meta name="author" content="Web Wiz " /> | ||
Copyright
This one identifies any copyright information there is for the web page.| <meta name="copyright" content="2015, Web Wiz " /> | ||
Expires
This meta tag is used by responsible web masters to let the search engine know when the page expires and can be removed from the search engines directory. It can either be set to never, or a date in the format day, month, year, eg. 28 June 2003.| <meta name="expires" content="never"/> | ||
Distribution
Tells the search engine who the page is meant for and can be set to; global, for everyone, local, for regional sites, and IU, for Internal Use.| <meta name="distribution" content="global" /> | ||
Robots
This Meta tag is used is used to tell the search engine whether you want the web page indexed or not. You only really need to use this Meta tag if you DON'T wont your web page indexed. The values for this tag are: -| index(default) | Index the page |
| noindex | Don't index the page |
| nofollow | Don't index any pages hyper-linked to this page |
| none | Same as "noindex, nofollow" |
| <meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow" /> | ||
Meta Tags Example
Below is an example of the head of a document containing Meta tags for search engines and a title for the web page: -| <head><title>Meta Tags Optimisation Tutorial - Web Wiz SEO Article</title> <meta name="description" content="Tips on how to optimise your Meta Tags to get your website higher in search engine results." /> <meta name="keywords" content="meta tags, tutorial, training, HTML" /> <meta name="rating" content="general" /> <meta name="copyright" content="2015, Web Wiz " /> <meta name="revisit-after" content="31 Days" /> <meta name="expires" content="never"> <meta name="distribution" content="global" /> <meta name="robots" content="index" />
</head>
| ||
