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Home » Other Tips » Meta Tags » Search Engines & Meta Tags

Search Engines & Meta Tags

Several meta tags can help you with getting better search engine traffic if you use them correctly. 

First, one important lesson.  These few tags will not, by themselves, get you top ranking in the search engines.  Yes, they help. No, they are not magic bullets.  

Description

<meta name=”description” content=”A few sentences describing this page.”>

The description tag is arguably the most important of the bunch for getting your page indexed well, although on page text is more important.  But, if you’re using a page that is largely text-free – graphics or Flash – then this tag is very important. 

This tag should be a grammatically correct sentence that describes your page in no more than 200-250 characters. 

Some search engines will display the content of this tag on the SERPs pages.  Because of this, you want to make sure you use good grammar. 

Keywords

<meta name=”keywords” content=”some, keywords, that, describe, your, site”>

This gives you the opportunity to tag your page with keywords that visitors might use to find your page.  Unfortunately this tag has become a haven for spammers and is not used by most search engines.  None of the big 3 (Google, Yahoo, MSN) support this tag anymore. 

Your list can be either space or comma separated, it doesn’t matter. Just be sure you don’t repeat any words.

Revisit-After

<meta name=”revisit-after” content=”15 days”>

In theory this tag tells search engines how often you want them to revisit your page.  In reality it doesn’t work.  The revisit-after tag was originally used by the Vancouver Webpages searchBC search engine and its VWbot_K robot, and was never picked up by any of the other search engines. 

If you feel the need to use this tag, and you really shouldn’t, the time must be measured in days.  You cannot use “12 hours” or “1 month”. 

So, what can you do to increase how often a search engine robot visits?  Your best bet is to update your page often. 

Robots

<meta name=”robots” content=”index|noindex,follow|nofollow”>

The robots meta tag allows you to suggest to web crawlers what to do with your page and links.  I say suggest because there is no real requirement that they follow this tag.

If you want web bots to add your page to their indexes and follow any links on your page you should use “index,follow”.  To keep them from indexing your page and tell them not to follow links you use “noindex,nofollow”.  And you can mix; both “index,nofollow” and “noindex,follow” are valid.  If you’re in to short cuts – “All” is the same as “index,follow” and “None” is the same as “noindex,nofollow”.  If you want the crawlers to index and follow all links; and really, why wouldn’t you; you can shorten it even more and leave this tag off entirely. 

You can also include “noarchive” to keep Google from caching your page.  This is a Google specific addition, although often additions by the big search engines make it into standards. 

Personally I never use this tag, instead opting to use a robots.txt file instead when I need to mark sections of my sites off-limits to web crawlers. 


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