HTML Meta Tags

Use HTML Meta Tags and Title Tag for best Search Engine Ranking

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HTML Meta Tags and Title Tag

What are HTML Meta Tags?

HTML Meta Tags are special HTML tags in the Head section of each web page.

They contain information which is not designed to be displayed by the browser. There are many of them, but most have no practical importance for us. Two of them (Description Meta Tag and Keywords Meta Tag) are relevant to achieving optimum search engine ranking for your site.

In this tutorial we also deal with the most important Title Tag. First, the HTML meta tags you need to know about:

HTML Meta Tags you should use

Description Meta Tag - Indicates to search engines what this site is about. Although less important than the Title tag, the Description meta tag is the most important of the meta tags.

Some search engines use the Description Meta Tag (together with other data) to decide what your page is about. The description should include your primary key phrase or your secondary key phrase, or if possible both (See next tutorial: Choosing Keywords)

Search Engines often choose to display the Description meta tag contents as the "snippet" portion of their search engine result pages, especially if that description contains the search terms which the user entered.

So its worthwhile making sure that the Description meta tag contains some inviting and relevant wording. The length can be up to 30 words or so, but search engines generally display only the first 20-25 words.

Remember that the search engine user has at least 10 web sites to choose from in his search engine results page. You have to make sure that your Description meta tag is

so relevant to your page content that the search engine chooses to display it as the snippet from your page, and
so inviting (together with your Title Tag) that the web surfer chooses your entry over the other entries on the search engine results page.

One source of interesting material for your Description Meta Tag is, of course, your own page content. You can choose a sentence or two from close to the top of your page. Search engines should judge that description highly relevant to your page contents.

Keywords Meta Tag - Indicates to search engines what keyword phrases you are targeting. Most search engines now ignore this field because it has been abused by webmasters stuffing all kinds of keywords into this HTML meta tag.

But it is probably still worth including your keywords and keyword phrases here (separated by commas) for those search engines which do use it. (Apparently Google doesn't.) You can also put in misspellings here which web surfers may use in their search terms.

In the next tutorial we will look at how to choose keywords for your web pages, so read that before deciding what keywords to use.

Other HTML Meta Tags you may want to use

Author Meta Tag - Indicates who wrote the page, but the information is not displayed in the browser. A visitor may find this HTML Meta Tag by viewing the HTML source of your web page.

Content-type Meta Tag (charset) - Tells the browser what character set to use to display your web page. This is actually quite important, because there are several different character sets for various parts of the world. If you do not specify which should be used, the user's browser will use its default settings, which might render your web page very strangely!

Commonly used character sets for English speaking countries are ISO-8859-1 and UTF-8. You can also specify this in an external CSS file for the whole website, which is probably better

For the exact syntax of the above HTML Meta tags, as well as the others not dealt with here, see Links/Resources. (If you are working with a WYSIWYG web editor it will probably allow you to set some of these HTML meta tags without actually going into the HTML.)

HTML Title Tag

This is not an HTML Meta Tag, (it has its own <TITLE> tag in HTML) but it is even more important than all the meta tags!

The Title Tag contains the official title of your web page, regardless of the contents of your main heading. The Title Tag has four uses and all of them are important:

The HTML Title tag contents are displayed in the browser bar while a visitor is viewing your site.
When a visitor bookmarks your page, the Title tag contents are used to create the bookmark entry.
Search engines regard the HTML Title tag as one of the foremost indications of what your page is about. So it influences how your page is indexed.
Search Engines display the Title tag contents as the very first part of the search results entry for your web page.

Choose the Title tag of each web page very carefully. The title must be highly relevant to the page content. It can be very short, but should not exceed 10 words or 65 characters. The title must be relevant to the searcher's quest and be interesting to her.

The Title tag should include your primary key phrase for that page, preferably as the initial phrase.

That's all for this tutorial. In the next we'll be looking at keywords and key phrases in more detail...

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Links / Resources

Snippet: The portion of web page content displayed by the search engine in its result page, after the web page title and before the URL

Articles about character sets:

W3: HTML Document Representation

Builder au: Character sets

More articles about Meta Tags:

Search Engine Watch: How to use HTML Meta Tags

Pandia: Top Meta Tag Myths

The Site Wizard: How to use Meta Tags

More articles about Titles:

Seo Logic: HTML Title Tags...

Wilson Web: How to write a compelling web page title.

Create Content: HTML Meta Tags Top Prev Next: Choosing Key Phrases

Using HTML Meta Tags and Title Tag for optimum Search Engine Rankings