Thread: The most important Meta Tags

Many webmasters think that meta tags are the key element on getting a top ranking in search engines. That's completely false. Meta tags are only HTML tags, located on the header of your website. They provide search engines information about a web page. Only the title meta tag is visible for the site visitors.

The most important tags are:

• Title - This isn't really a meta tag. The text between the "title" tags is your page title, the text your visitors will see at the top of their browser.

• Keywords - Here you can put your most relevant keywords. Although major crawlers don't give so much importance to it.

• Description - Your page description. This is the text that search engines will display on the result page, as a preview of your site.

• Robots - This meta tag allows you to specify if the page shouldn't be indexed by a search engine.

There are also many other meta tags. If you view the source code of a website you may also find author, generator, revisit, date, and many other meta tags. These are not so important for search engines.

SEO's are in disagreement on which meta tags are used by which engines and how much weight the engines place on meta tags.

The best advise we can provide is to always include meta tags, but do not abuse them by attempting to stuff them full of keywords not present on the page.

There is never any harm in including well formed, relevant meta tags.

Originally Posted by james121

SEO's are in disagreement on which meta tags are used by which engines and how much weight the engines place on meta tags.

The best advise we can provide is to always include meta tags, but do not abuse them by attempting to stuff them full of keywords not present on the page.

There is never any harm in including well formed, relevant meta tags.

Exactly. That is why, as far as I know, Google isn't taking in consideration the meta keywords for SERP. Because many webmasters used to spam them and add a lot of irrelevant keywords.

I agree with you guys. Meta tags plays important role in SEO, but they should be related to the content of our webpage.

Always, title tags are the focus of on-page SEO. Meta description tags might be omitted by Google some day in the future, too. :)

Thanks,

Originally Posted by airforce1

Always, title tags are the focus of on-page SEO. Meta description tags might be omitted by Google some day in the future, too. :)

Thanks,

You're right. I can't wait to find out what will change with the new caffeine update they're announcing.

well discussed.. i came to know more about SEO

I wouldnt list Keywords at all in my "most" important list. The best reason for this is because google (the big dog) ignores it!

i dont think meta description will be omitted... meta description appears on the search results describing website...

Most major search engines no longer use META tags to determine the search engine placement. Rather they use content to determine search engine placement since the searchers are interested at what is on a page on not what the page says about itself. In addition to continent, other factors include semantical coding (using <hx> tags for headings, <p> for paragraphs, etc), text in links referring to your site; position of search terms in your page (how close to the top, etc), number of sites linking to your page and so forth.