Years ago what you put in your meta tags would make or break or search engine ranking. Search engine marketers would emphasize heavily on what was said in the meta tags, because it played a big role on where the site ranked. You would find websites that had more text in there <head> tag then they did on the front page of the website. Imagine over 15 lines of meta tag’s being used on each page. Now a days though all of those meta tags are useless and a waste of space. There are a few meta tags that I still recommend everyone to use and I will go further into that in a bit. First let’s take a look at some meta tags that you will find by these “meta tag generators” that I would not bother using.
<META HTTP-EQUIV=”refresh” CONTENT=”10″>
This tag would refresh the page after 10 seconds. Never use the refresh meta tag. There is no reason why you should be refreshing the page unless you are looking to redirect the user to another part of your website or a different domain name. Even then this is not the recommended way of accomplishing that.
<META NAME=”Expires” CONTENT=”never”>
This tells the search engine spider/robot when the page will expire or be out of date.
<META NAME=”Classification” CONTENT=” “>
This meta tag would be used to classify your webpage for a directory or if the search engine breaks down a site to categorize it.
<META NAME=”Author” CONTENT=” “>
This meta tag specifies who the author is. To me this is just a waste of space and I have seen clients who have using keywords here that had no effect.
<META NAME=”Subject” CONTENT=” “>
This would be the subject of the webpage, and then again you have a title for the webpage I hope so just use that.
<META NAME=”Copyright” CONTENT=”© “>
Copyright notice would go here.
<META NAME=”rating” content=”general”>
This meta tag is used to give your website a rating for your audience. You could manipulate this tag by having an adult site or gambling site and still set it to general. Yea I can see how this will help you, use the backspace key and save yourself the time of even typing this one out.
<META NAME=”Revisit-After” CONTENT=”XX Days”>
On new clients websites I still come across this tag quite a bit. Why would you want to tell the search engine spider/robot to only come back after XX amount of days? Hell why would they even want to listen to you? If you set this number to say 45 days and each day you add new content the search engine wouldn’t come back until after the 45 days are up? You have got to be kidding me! Highlight the entire meta tag and use the delete key in the upper right hand corner, thank you.
Misc. Meta Tags
<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOODP”>
This will make sure that your title or description from DMOZ will not be used on the SERP’s.
<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOYDIR”>
<META NAME=”Slurp” CONTENT=”NOYDIR”>
This tag will make sure that your Yahoo directory title or description will not be used on the SERP’s.
<META NAME=”Robots” content=”all”>
You can use this meta tag if you are not comfortable or just do not want to create and use a robots.txt file. Here you can specify to the search engine spider/robot what pages or directories you do not want them to crawl and index.
So What Tags To Use?
<META NAME=”Description” CONTENT=” “>
Using the description tag is a must in my opinion. Google and other search engines sometimes use this tag when displaying your website on the SERP’s. The description tag should be different for each webpage you create, keeping the same description tag on every page is not an effective way for SEO on your website. Whatever keywords or keyword phrases you are going for on that specific page, you will want to word your description tag around them as well.
<META NAME=”Keywords” CONTENT=” “>
There are search engines out there that ignore this meta tag (Google being one). However there are smaller search engines that still use this tag to help index your website so why not take the extra minute to use this one. I am sure others will argue and say why not take the minute and use one listed above. Also it has been shown that not using this meta tag will not hurt your SERP’s with some of the major engines. This one is up in the air to use or not, I still use them on my client’s websites. You will want to have created different keyword meta tags for each page as well but do not spam your keywords or key phrases in this tag.
Those are really the only two tags you should use at all times. I know using the Keyword tag is not needed for certain search engines however since it is used for others I say use it, but do not abuse it. The end result is you are always looking for a slight advantage over your competition to boost your website on the SERP’s. Meta tags are not as important as they used to be, so if you come across a company that is offering there SEO services and focuses heavily on altering your meta tags and how important they are just walk away. Those companies have no clue what they are talking about and just want whatever money they can get from you and that is it. They are just like the companies who will submit your website to 1,000’s of search engines for a fee. I will talk about that however in another post.
