Meta Tags and Search Engines

Meta Tags and SEO

There’s a bunch of thoughts on the Internet about the use (or non use) of meta tags for your website, these are some of mine.

It’s a given that many SEO experts claim you don’t need meta tags anymore the way search engines spider and index a site. There’s some truth to that, but in world of all things (websites) created equally, why wouldn’t you use them to help separate your site from the millions you’re competing with? Used properly, they surely can’t hurt, only help your rankings.

Here’s some tags in your header section (between the <head> and </head> tags I consider a must:

title, description, keywords

And a few more I use:

revisit-after, robots, abstract, copyright, distribution, author, page-topic

If you take a look at the source code of www.TelepresenceToday.com, you’ll see the way I use these tags. Example below:

<title>Telepresence | Telepresence Today, News Articles Information</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”Telepresence Today | News, articles and information on telepresence including advice, domain sales, consulting, locations, rooms, rentals and more”>
<meta name=”keywords” content=”telepresence, news, network, sytem, cisco, nortel, polycom, hp, hdtv, lifesize, halo, options, 3d, home, work, business, information, telepresence rent, rental, location, sales, site, center, telepresence room, suite, meeting”>
<meta name=”revisit-after” content=”7 days”>
<meta name=”robots” content=”index,follow”>
<meta name=”abstract” content=”Telepresence Today | News, articles and information on telepresence including advice, domain sales, consulting, locations, rooms, rentals and more”>
<meta name=”copyright” content=”Copyright © 2009 - All rights reserved”>
<meta name=”distribution” content=”global”>
<meta name=”author” content=”L II, Inc.”>
<meta name=”page-topic” content=”Telepresence Today - Telepresence News and Articles”>

Every tag has a specific function.

Meta tags assist in the “relevancy scoring” of your page within search engine algorithms. So a site that has the “keyword”, or “keywords” in the domain name, title, description, keywords and also the actual text on your page will surely rate a decent score. It gets a little more complicated then just having all these “parts” installed, but at least having them present is considered a fundamental piece of the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) puzzle.

One note, some developers believe you only need tags on your index (home) page. I’m not of those, at a minimum I believe in having the title, description and keywords tags on all pages. It takes time, but in my experiences it well worth the time to build them properly. By properly I mean non-spammy, correct length and relevant to your page content.

Here’s a link to a great free (we like free) tool to check your site meta tags and see your “relevancy” scores:

www.submitexpress.com/analyzer/

More to come….