I've been told that adding a different meta title and description per page is strongly recommended.
What is the correct way to do this? Is there a recommended naming convention for the title? I assume there's a standard for this rather than whatever the developer decides is best.
At first I would recommend to sign in to the Google Webmaster Tools. There you sign in your website and get a lot of information and resources to improve the information structure of your website.
Here you have an article from Google about the topic: Meta tags that Google understands
About the meta name="description" element:
<meta name="description" content="A description of the page" />
This tag provides a short description of the page. In some situations this description is used as a part of the snippet shown in the search results.
About the title element:
<title>The Title of the Page</title>
While technically not a meta tag, this tag is often used together with the "description". The contents of this tag are generally shown as the title in search results (and of course in the user's browser).
Also think about implementing structured data, see schema.org.
I think it is important these days to have a web standards based, clean and semantically rich HTML markup for your whole page.
title
(Note that the title element is not a "meta title".)
HTML5 defines that the title element should identify documents "even when they are used out of context". So for a typical website, you should always include the site name in the title.
For usability reasons, it’s most of the time a good idea to specify the page name before the site name (e.g., page name – site name).
HTML5 doesn’t recommend a delimiter for separating the page name from the title.
meta-description
HTML5 defines that the description metadata name is used to "describe the page". The value must be "appropriate for use in a directory of pages, e.g. in a search engine".
As the homepage typically represents the whole site, it’s appropriate to describe the site (instead of the page) in the homepage’s meta-description.
Related
I don't know what is meta element in HTML and its usability. What is the purpose of name and content attributes, and how will this element affect my webpage?
I have seen it a couple of times and I tried to learn from a book, but I couldn't understand it.
<html>
<head>
<title>What is meta?</title>
<meta>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>
Meta is another word for self-referential, which means that meta(data) tags provide information about the HTML document (i.e. the webpage) itself.
w3schools has a good description on the HTML meta tag:
They won't be displayed on the page, but will be machine parsable.
For example, common meta tag attributes are description (what is this document about?) and author (who does this belong to?) which are used for machines like search engines.
Beyond this, you can also set things like character encoding and the viewport which is commonly used for responsive web design, so you can probably guess that it can be widely useful for your webpage!
Good luck in your learning.
Other resources:
https://smallbusiness.chron.com/meta-tags-used-promote-accessibility-search-engine-opimization-74918.html
https://metatags.io
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/meta
It helps at bit with your site's seo and makes it easier for search engines to know more about your site. Some tags, however, can be viewed in the search engine (eg. description can be seen in Google under the link)
I have a website, and I need to figure out a few things:
Where to put the meta tag?
How many meta tags do I need?
Can I put all the webpages in 1 meta tag or do I need multiple?
As for my website, there are over 1000 things you can do, so an example would be "John is looking for a poker player." On my website, if you go under board games and click cards, you could add a classify OR if you do a search, you can look for members who play poker/card games. This is one example of thousands of activities.
My question is: do I need to create 1 meta tag for keywords of poker, friend, activity to show up on an SEO, OR can I create 1 meta tag that will hold 1000+ keywords on 1000+ different topics?
My website was created in C#. I'm confused when I google meta tags on youtube and find them written out in notepad as an html.
You should not use Meta tag for keywords !
The Keywords Meta Tag
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, the “keywords” meta tag was
a critical element for early search engines. Much like the dinosaurs,
this tag is a fossil from ancient search engine times.
The only search engine that looks at the keywords anymore is
Microsoft's Bing – and they use it to help detect spam. To avoid
hurting your site, your best option is to never add this tag.
Or, if that's too radical for you to stomach, at least make sure you
haven't stuffed 300 keywords in the hopes of higher search rankings.
It won't work. Sorry.
If you already have keyword meta tags on your website, but they aren't
spammy, there's no reason to spend the next week hurriedly taking them
out. It's OK to leave them for now – just take them out as you're
able, to reduce page weight and load times.
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Meta tags should be in <head>, css also in <head>, javascript if it possible at the end of the <body>.
You can check google web speed test
EDIT:
Here is meta description and title. If your website is written on C# this is probably located in Site.Master !
<head>
<title>Not a Meta Tag, but required anyway </title>
<meta name="description" content="Awesome Description Here">
</head>
1) Meta tags are always in <head> element of page.
2) It depends on what metadata you want to add to your page.
3) You will need 1 <meta> tag for each meta type. So 1 tag will be enough for your keywords.
You can find more about meta tag on W3Schools.
Today I came across a <link rel="image_src"> tag. I don't know about it, so I use google. Google tell me that this tag are similar to og:image. So I came to open graph main site to read about it http://ogp.me/, but i found nothing about link rel="image_src". So this tag is replacement to meta property="og:image" or is in special tag in another specification ? How use this tag or for what is used?
The rel attribute specifies the type of the link, i.e. the kind of the relationship between the document and the linked resource. Usually just a few keywords, like stylesheet and icon, are used. Although many other keywords have been proposed and registered, most of them are write-only: they are meant to express something, but nobody cares (no software uses the information).
The extension mechanisms of HTML5 include, in the description of link types, a somewhat obscure mechanism that allows, in theory, anyone register his favorite keyword in the existing rel values wiki to make documents using it as rel value “conforming”.
And image_src has indeed been registered there, with the information that it is used to “specify a Webpage Icon for use by Facebook, Yahoo, Digg, etc.”, no specification has been identified but an article about it is linked to, and it is “probably redundant with rel=icon”.
You can use this tag to use an image as the thumb for link share.
When someone posts a link to your site on social media, such as Facebook, the image that is displayed with your link is usually the first one in your code. This may not be the image that best fits defines your site, and it may not fit well in the small box that Facebook posts. The link rel="image_src" tag lets you control what image (or images, you can have more than one by stacking separate references) is displayed alongside your link.
I am building a website designed for 4 different languages, using Sinatra, and using the I18n libs to insert localised content, but I am wondering what to do about the standard HTML5 meta tags for things like description and keywords, and how Google and other search engines will treat them if I localise the content in those tags.
Ideally I want to be able to tell Google (et al), perhaps via information in a sitemap.xml file or something (though I'm not certain that's even possible), that the site may be parsed in these 4 languages, and so present correctly localised keywords, and descriptions to users depending on their locale preference.
Likewise I want to be able to localise the information going out to Twitter and Facebook by localising the relevant og meta tags, and twitter:card` meta tags.
Note: the actual page URLs will be the same no matter the language chosen, localised content is rendered in the Slim templates themselves.
Is it enough, for example, to specify
html lang='de_DE'
I'm after a best-practice and DRY way of achieving nicely localised search result summary information for my international users.
If the different language versions reside at the same URL, then what search engines get is what your server sends to a browser that does specify any language preferences. According to your description, it thus seems that they always get the default (English) version. No meta tags or lang attributes can affect this. (And search engines ignore lang attributes.)
So you should arrange thing so that each language version of a page has a URL of its own. (The difference could be in the query part only, e.g. ?lang=de-DE at the end.) Moreover, the versions should be interlinked, with link elements or with visible a links, so that when a search engine has found one version, it will find the other versions, too, just by following links.
P.S. Writing <meta name=keywords ...> tags is probably waste of time. Google has ignored them long ago.
You can provide meta elements with content in different languages on the same HTML document by using the lang attribute:
<meta name="description" lang="de" content="…" />
<meta name="description" lang="en" content="…" />
<meta name="description" lang="es" content="…" />
<meta name="description" lang="fr" content="…" />
If any third party services like Google or Facebook recognize this is a different question which cannot be answered in general, depends on the specific service, context and the point in time, as things might change rapidly.
However (as Jukka K. Korpela notes, too), in general you should use separate URLs for translations. Give users (and search enginges etc.) the ability to link to a specific language version.
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I read some articles on Internet, some said that search engine like Google and Bing don't care about HTML Meta Tags any more. Should I still need to maintain the HTML Meta Tags in my website properly?
Thanks!
Are meta tags critical? Every search engines emphasizes meta tags differently. Google doesn't let the public know how it uses meta tags. I have noticed that a lot of websites show up on the first page of Google for specific subjects and yet they don't have any keyword or description tags. So don't let anybody fool you by exaggerating how important they are for Search Engine Optimization. Search engines index algorithms vary greatly -- some assign a lot of importance to meta tags, so it is a good idea to use them.
Meta tags are lines of code that are hidden in web pages. The code information is not revealed in the web browser (but refer to the discussion of the description tag, below) but they are utilized by search engines to help categorize your web content. It is possible that you might choose to omit descriptions, or keywords, but your site won't look right if you don't put a "title" tag, since the web browsers will show it as "Untitled".
In order to obtain traffic (by cheating) a long time ago, people would place repetitive or irrelevant information into their meta tags -- "stuffing" them. As a penalty, several search engines don't put too much importance on keywords in meta tags, but they still look at them to be certain they have meaning. Whichever the case, your rank will probably suffer on other search engines if you lack meta tags, or have useless keywords.
The "head" section of a web page is where meta tags are found. Some people suggest using only lowercase letters in your tags, and avoid repeating terms within the keyword tag.
Generally speaking, the actual meta tag contents appear invisible; however the "description" meta tag's contents will turn up in the majority of search engines together with the page title in the search results. Do not overdo your meta description; you can place keywords in the description tag, but try to keep language natural, in complete sentences, and keep it short and relevant.
In short, yes - META tags are important. But not all of them.
Purely from search engine listings - Always include a useful META DESCRIPTION thats unique for every page - even if that doesn't bump you up the rankings, a good succinct description will do wonders for your click throughs and bounce rates, because people are more likely to think they can find what they are looking for.
I would also include META KEYWORDS although it should be said that its probably of no use - so I generally pick out some site wide keywords and use them throughout.
Other META tags have uses such as the ROBOTS tag, and the like - but they are for other purposes.
here is the thing: what do you summarize as meta tags, do you only mean meta tags or everything in the
<head>
of your HTML? the sloppy definition of meta tags mostly includes these elements as well.
these "meta" tags are still very very important for efficient SEO.
<title></title> (not really a meta tag, but in the <head> section) because google uses it (in most cases) as the headline of the listing in the SERP
<meta rel="description" content="because google uses this text here as the snippet text of the SERP (in most cases) listing">
<meta content='noindex, nofollow, noarchive, nosnippet' name='robots'/>
a very efficient directive to control the indexing behavior (and to some extend the crawling behavior and value allocation) of google
<meta name=”robots” content=”noodp”>
get rid of snippets that use http://www.dmoz.org/ for descriptions
<meta name="robots" content="noimageindex">
advises google to not index the images found on this page (but they might get indexed if they are used on other pages)
<link href='http://www.example.com/en/vienna/cha-no-ma' rel='canonical' />
(not meta, but in the head) communicate a canonical URL (the one you would like to get indexed) to the search engines.
<link href="http://www.example.com/en/vienna/b/billa" hreflang="en" rel="alternate" />
together with the canonical a cool way to communicate alternate language versions of a page to google
<link href='http://microformats.org/profile/hcard' rel='profile' />
if you want to achieve rich snippets in google by using microformats, these meta informations are necessary.
<META http-equiv="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
indication of content type and encoding
<META NAME="google-site-verification" CONTENT="+nxGUDJ4QpAZ5l9Bsjdi102tLVC21AIh5d1Nl23908vVuFHs34="/>
a way to verify your site for google webmaster tools
stuff that is not important:
meta keyword tag, just forget about it. its useless (and if you put spammy words in it even of negative value)