SEO Meta Tag Tutorial
Meta Tags are a great way to relay imformation to search engine spiders, a very good thing for Search Engine Optimization. Their are tons of meta tags executing a large array of tasks. I will cover the most basic meta tags and tell you about the tags themselves. You will most likely need a lot more than just meta tags to get ahead of your competitors (in somoe cases not), but these will atleasat get you in google and on your way.
The Syntax:
The actual tag is
<meta>
For most of them you would add either the attribute, name="" or http-equiv="". After that you would use content="" to hold your information. To get your code XHTML valid you can add a self closing tag at the end.
Example of an HTML Tag:
<meta name="keywords" content="awesome, guide">
Example of an XHTML Tag
<meta name="keywords" content="awesome, guide">
If I were to create a set if meta tags for this page I may use a set like this:
<meta equiv="content-type" content="text/html; iso-8859-1">
<meta equiv="Content-Type" content="cache">
<meta name="robots" content="INDEX,FOLLOW">
<meta equiv="content-language" content="english">
<meta name="keywords" content="SEO, get, in, google, search, engine, optimization,">
<meta name="description" content="Utilize SEO and get maximum hits. Learn how to optimize your site and get garaunteed into google with none of that online marketing crap!">
<meta name="author" content="twitter.com/a2ztricks">
<meta name="publisher" content="twitter.com/a2ztricks">
<link rev="made" content="youremail@yoursite.com">
<meta name="copyright" content="twitter.com/a2ztricks">
<meta name="audience" content="All">
<meta name="page-topic" content="SEO">
<meta name="revisit-after" content="3 days">
Let's take a closer look at each line, what it does, the variations and some tips for creating your set.
Line 1
<meta equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; iso-8859-1">
This is specifying what coding language and encoding type your web page is using. It first states that it is using html coding (essentialy that it is a web page). It also states that it's text meaning it has text. Kind of poinless but you must have that to be valid. For some reason html makes you specify two types of codings. It then have a semi colon, which tells the search engine it is another object within the same tag attribute. It then states that it is using iso-8859. This is an encoding language. It makes it so that your language will display correctly on web paes. Their are different encodings for different languages. I use and reccomend iso-8859-1. That is english with some european languages. If you are using a different language just google encoding types.
Line 2
<meta equiv="Content-Type" content="cache">
If you have a high memory web site you may want to consider this. However you should still use it if you have a highly optimized site. It's primary function is to make the user's browser cache the page. It will take less time for them to load it.
Their are, however many reasons why you would not want to use it. Change content="cache" to content="no-cache". Why would you want your pages to load slower you ask? No! Not to be like microsoft! If you are using a dynamic auto refresh, it will load their cache and your content will not appear updated to them. With no-cache, they will have to connect to the server and retrieve the new content. The other problem is if they had to fill out forms it would be cached in their browsers profile. Spyware could easily retrieve all their personal information and credit card numbers. Both of these also effect wether you want spiders to cache your page or not.
Line 3
<meta name="robots" content="INDEX,FOLLOW">
This is telling a search engine indexer to index this page, and follow all of the links. Very useful, but often not supported by a spider. Change FOLLOW to NO-FOLLOW to make the search engine not follow any liinks, and change INDEX to NO-INDEX to tell search engines not to index your page. You might want to use nofollow to persude your affiliates to pay you for a index, follow page.
Line 4
<meta equiv="content-language" content="english">
This tells a Search engine Spider that the language on this page is English, it helps you because if a search engine shows your result to another surfer and its not in their language, it will give the option to translate to their language. Just put in your language if you are not using english.
Line 5
<meta name="keywords" content="SEO, get, in, google, search, engine, optimization, ">
These are keywords. If you use these and your site is doing fairly good in google, when someone searches a keyword your site may pop up and the searcher may click your link. Spiders are very smart though. If you put too many keywords and keywords totally irrelevant to your site google will actually reject your site and there is a chance that they will over look your site and never index it. It is better to have 5 or six highly descriptive, high quality keywords over 20 popularly searched irrelevant keywords. You must also remember that your competitors are not stupid. They also have meta tags and optimized sites. You also have millions of competitors at it. So 1 million lasting optimized sites versus yours for a "popular" keyword search versus a new site? Who will be a the top?
Line 6
<meta name="description" content="Utilize SEO and get maximum hits. Learn how to optimize your site and get garaunteed into google with none of that online marketing crap!">
This tag is for a descriptive paragraph of your site. When you search something you will get the page title and then a description underneath. This is that description. There are two main things you need to remember when making a description. It must be persuasive and short. You might write a page long descriptioin but google is only going to show a small paragraph! If you were to search and reading those descriptions you would want to know exactly what was on that page so aim your desription to be like that.
Line 7
<meta name="author" content="twitter.com/a2ztricks">
This meta tag specifies the author or writer of this page. The main point of this is to get the copyright of the article to your name and no-one elses. You may want to use your name or your sites name. Only use your sites name if you own a top level domain or you have multiple people work on the same page.
Line 7
<meta name="publisher" content="twitter.com/a2ztricks">
This meta tag gives the name of the publisher. This means you have all rights to use the article on your site. You may want to use your name or your sites name. Only use your sites name if you own a top level domain or you have multiple people work on the same page.
line 8
<link rev="made" content="youremail@yoursite.com">
This tag tells a spider who made this page. Who to contact if something is wrong. I reccomend against using this tag. Email harvesters can easily get your email and spam the crap out of you. Their are some javascript codes to protect you from this and you can also use a witty disguise such as email@INSERT-THIS-SITES-URL-HERE.com. Spam harversters aren't smart enough to figure out stuff like this, YET.
Line 9
<meta name="copyright" content="twitter.com/a2ztricks">
This gives the copyright owner of all content on the page. It is concreting the copyright to you. You may want to use your name or your sites name. Only use your sites name if you own a top level domain or you have multiple people work on the same page.
Line 10
<meta name="audience" content="All">
This tell Search engines that this webpage is suitable for all ages, their are more varations but even if you have adult content you might as well leave this out and get more hits.
line 11
<meta name="page-topic" content="SEO">
Tells search engines the topic of your webpage, Looks cool and sites with this tag are more likely to get indexed by google. Variations are pretty much exactly as you would say it. IE: Communications, Computers, Teens, People & Politics, Media & Information, etc.
line 12
<meta name="revisit-after" content="3 days">
This tells search engines to revisit and reindex your site after a certain amount of time. You can replace 3 with any interjer and days with months and weeks. Don't abuse this tag, if those smart little spiders find your content hasn't changed for a while it will disregard your page.
This is just one of the many skills needed to get high in the search engines. I plan in the near future to release more SEO articles to you in the very near future.
This guide and all of it's content is ccopyrighted to twitter.com/a2ztricks. Ripping and redistribution is not allowed in any way.
