What Meta Tags Do I Need?

How often have you wondered what meta tags are needed for a webpage? There are a number of meta tags that can be included, a short list are Abstract, Author, Copyright, Description, Distribution, Expires, Keyword, Language, Refresh, Revisit, and Robots. Today's article will touch on what tags are actually needed for your site.

The Description and Keyword Tags

First of all before we go on, you should have a title tag on every page, and have it personalized/optimized for each page accordingly. Ok, so after the Title tag, the only other meta tags that you need in your coding is the description and keyword meta tag. And to be quite honest, the keyword tag is not really going to make a difference and the majority of the search engines do not place hardly any weighting on it. With that being said, that doesn't mean that you can go and keyword stuff your keyword tag, We still want to keep the site spam free. Another question you may have with the keyword tag is, do you need commas between the words/phrases or not? The search engines see a comma as a space, so its up to yourself if you want to have them in or not. Its not going to make or break your sites rankings.  The other important tag is the description tag. While this does not have much bearing on the actual ranking that a site or page will receive, this could  have some effect on whether someone chooses to click on your listing in the search engines or not. So, while it may not add much value to the actual ranking, it can have a good impact on people wanting to click to your site.

The Robots Tag

This tag is good if you have do not want something indexed in the search engines. If you do not want pages indexed, it is advised that you have a robots.txt file as well. The robots tag could be as follows. You do not need to have the robots meta tag on your pages if you want it indexed. The search engine spiders will naturally follow all the links on your site and check for the robots tag or text file to see what it should not index or follow.

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">

So, essentially there are only 3 or 4 tags that you will want to have on your site. As to what order they appear in. I have a personal preference to have the title tag first, description then the keyword tag, but quite frankly, its not going to make that much of a difference. The title tag is one of the most important tags and tends to focus on your main keyword phrases, so I like to have this closer to top of the coding.

Gerard Manning
Search Engine Placement Specialist
Search Engine Marketing Agency :: Manning Search Marketing