Meta Tags

Please be very careful when writing your meta tags, they must be highly relevant to that page's content. Do not use the same meta data for every page on your website.

There are many meta tags, however the main three are:

• <META name="title" content="your page title goes here">

This is the page meta title and is usually displayed as the first part of the search results, this is the most important tag so make sure you give this some thought and it matches the page content as closely as possible.

• <META name="description" content="your page description goes here">

The description will also be displayed in part along with the title of your page in search results, keep it highly relevant to the page content and must be at least 15 words long and ideally 20 to 22 words long.

• <META name="keywords" content="a, list, of, keywords,">

Use only relevant keywords contained in the body text or very similar in meaning to words in your body text, using irrelevant or off topic keywords is a big no no.

You must make the meta tags relevant for each particular page and don't try to trick the visitors by using false keywords, or your pages, and even your whole website may suffer as a result, for instance if you are using a web page to sell toy soldiers, but the meta data is all about toy cars then your web page ranking will suffer as a result.

Meta data

In extreme cases where obvious deception is intended for instance if you used a list of super models names in order to entice visitors to your insurance company website they you can expect to be dropped from search engines listings altogether. So don't do it, ever ! 

Remember also that the same unique content rules apply to meta data, don't steal other website's meta tags or you may suffer penalties for exact match copy.

This quick guide to meta tags will be extended soon.