Meta Tag - Useful Meta Tags Explained

Meta tags - effect of meta tags on your website

Most meta tags have no positive effect on your search engine rankings. Although these meta tags do not usually cause problems with your sites rankings, they are basically useless code that the search engine spiders need to crawl through before reaching the content on your page.

Meta robots tag explained

The most commonly misused meta tag is the meta robots tag.

Examples of how this meta tag looks are:

There is no evidence of any search engines using this meta tag at all. Search engine robots will spider your page by default. Using a meta tag to tell a search engine spider to read all of your page or to return to your site after an allotted time, will not work. With all the sites indexed on these search engines, could you really expect a spider to return to your site exactly one month later just because you ask it to?

The only influence you can have on the spidering of your site is preventing search engine spiders from indexing a page. This is best done using a robots text file or robots.txt file, not by using meta tags.

Effective meta tags explained

As well as a Page Title, the only effective meta tags you need on your website pages are the meta description tag, meta keywords tag, meta title tag and the meta content type tag, these should look like this:

You need a description meta tag and you need to let the spider know the content type. Although these are the most important meta tags to have on your website, we always include the keyword meta tag and the meta title tag, as there has been recent evidence to suggest the google spiders are reading some of the content in these tags. There is no benefit to be derived from putting any other meta tags into the head of the source code, other than these tags.

Common Head Tag Coding Error

Another coding error that is commonly made is missing out the doctype tag. This tag, which should be placed before the head tag and meta tags, is very important as it lets the search engine spiders know what version of html coding is used in the site. Your doctype tag should look something like this:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

Some head tags are still important, irrespective of the misinformation that you'll find on forums all over the web. Don't miss the main meta tags from your code, but don't waste lines of code with pointless tags that are of no benefit to your site.

This table shows the current search engine results page standings for the website meta tags terms. SERPs correct as at 10/04/2008, Pages in bold are number one positions.
Key Phrase useful head tags head tags explained effective meta tags meta tags explained robots tags	Google Page 1 Page 1 Page 1 Page 1 Page 1	Yahoo Page 1 Page 1 Page 1 Page 1 Page 4	MSN Page 1 Page 1 Page 1 Page 1 Page 1

Telephone:	0131 208 2038 0208 123 6963
Address:	Kenkai House, 19 Marshall Way Muirside, Alloa Clackmannanshire, Scotland, UK FK10 2GA
Email:	info@kenkai.com