When It Comes To Meta Tags, You Only Need Three

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

When it comes to HTML, you can always count on accuracy and detail delivering your website’s content in proper order to the search engines. If you are new to website building, or are struggling to understand why your website is not performing this article may be of tremendous value to you.

First, let’s look at meta tags, these are the main points of interest to the search engines, they do not look at a webpage as humans do, so meta tags are the brail, if you will, to what they see. Meta tags should always be between the *head* and */head* tags, like so:

*head*

*title*(Your Website Title)*/title*

*meta name=”description” content=”(Your website’s description) “*

*meta name=”keywords” content=”keyword,keyword,keyword,etc “*

*meta name=”Author” content=”www.your-website.com”*

*meta name=”owner” content=”www.your-website.com”*

*meta name=”classification” content=”(The main subject matter of your site) “*

*meta name=”copyright” content=”copyrighted 2006″*

*meta name=”rating” content=”General”*

*meta name=”revisit-after” content=”15 days”*

*meta name=”ROBOTS” content=”ALL”* */head*

You don’t need that many meta tags. SEO has gone crazy with fluff in the last few years and too many so-called gurus are telling people to do things that don’t make sense. And the fact that this article was printed in a respectable web journal like SiteProNews just makes it even worse. New webmasters will look at this and take it as gospel when, in reality, it just isn’t right.

The only meta tags you really need to worry about are the title, description, and keyword tags. Everything else is superfluous. Here’s what I want you to do. Right click on the web page you are looking at right now. Go ahead. Right click and select “View Source.” Look at the meta tags and you will notice that there is a title tag, a description tag, and a keyword tag. That’s all. Nothing more. Nothing less. I’m a firm believer in practicing what you preach.

Now why is that all you need? Think about it. Author and Owner, what do they say? The provide the URL of the website you are on. Why? You know where you are, don’t you? What’s the point? There isn’t one. It’s just fluff. Take it out and never use it again. Search engines don’t care to see it and what they’re really looking for is the content and the meat. The meat is in your three important tags.

Classification? Main subject matter of the site? That’s what your description tag is for. Why put it in there twice? The search engines ignore this tag. They don’t ignore your description tag.

Copyright? We know you own your site. If you have a WhoIs account, and everyone who owns a website is listed in WhoIs, then your website is copyrighted. Who cares what year you put it up? No one. Not even the search engines.

Rating. I don’t even know what that is. It isn’t necessary. I know that.

Revisits and robots – well, search engines send their robots to crawl web pages every day. All day long. If you have a web site you will get crawled. You don’t have to tell the search engines to crawl your site. You don’t even have to tell them how often to crawl your site. They will crawl your site every time you update it. That’s what they do. Now if you don’t want your website crawled then you can include code to tell the search engines not to crawl your site but unless you have secure areas for memberships and items you don’t want public then why would you do that? Tags that tell the search engines to crawl your website and how often aren’t necessary.

So what are the necessary tags? Three of them:

• Title
• Description
• Keyword

Your title tag is the name of that specific web page. HINT: Search engines crawl web pages, not web sites. Don’t put the same title tag on every page. Every page needs its own title tag. Make the title of each page correspond to the keywords you are using to optimize that page by.

The description tag are the two or three sentences that show up in search queries whenever a person makes a search and the search engine returns its results. The description tells the searcher what that web page is about. It’s not about your entire web site. It’s about an individual web page because search engines pull results for searches based on information found on individual web pages. Your description should include your keyword once, maybe twice, but not more. It must tell searchers what they can expect to find on your web page when they click the link. Make it interesting because you want them to click the link.

The keyword tag tells the search engines what keywords your website is optimized for. This is important. They will find that information anyway by scanning your content, but help them out here. Don’t include a list of every keyword on your website. This isn’t a wish list. You aren’t telling Google what you hope to get ranked for. You are telling the search engines what keywords you are using to build that specific web page around. Don’t use more than five or six and don’t use less than two. It’s OK to have multiple keywords on a page, just don’t get crazy and include every keyword related to your website’s content. That will hurt you more than help you.