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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)
Related
Can anybody tell me that why we use meta tag in html
Meta tags helps your website getting found by search engines like Google, Bing etc.
When you use it the right way in combination with some landing page you can get found in the best way. Another method is the use of link-exchange. If you use the 3 methods it could get your websites way better indexed by google then if you only use the meta-tags.
If you want to know more about it, just search on google with keywords: landing page, indexed by google, meta-tags, link-exchange etc.
Meta tags describe your page. Search engines have famously used them to help index your pages. Its got nothing to do with asp.net but rather the HTML output that is produced. See here for more information. Be aware although that search engines rely less on them as they do now and incorporate other factors into their indexing.
Meta tags are used for many things. The most important use for meta tags would be probably for SEO purposes. The meta description is probably one of the most important parts of the meta tag because that is what shows up under the title on Search Engines such as Google or Yahoo. The following link will give you more information about SEO and how you can use the meta tag. https://blog.kissmetrics.com/website-source-code-seo/
The meta tag can also do many other things such as set the author, viewport and keywords of a web page. Here is a link that will tell you a lot more about what the meta tag is used for. https://www.w3schools.com/Tags/tag_meta.asp
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.
Check this link for crucial parts for your SEO !
This website can give you points in which your SEO is not good !
Also it will be good to see how fast your website is responding. You can check this link
Last 2 links give you detail information how you should fix the problems which you have.
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.
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.
Is it correct approach to have more than one keywords metatag on the website ?
for example:
<meta name="keywords" content="test1" />
<meta name="keywords" content="test2" />
or is it an error ?
Thank You very much for help
As taken from Webmasters
The keywords meta tag doesn't do anything anymore, at least as far as most search engines are concerned. You're trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist. Search engines index by content nowadays, and they do that without your help.
See the Wikipedia article on the meta tag:
Search engines began dropping support for metadata provided by the meta element in 1998, and by the early 2000s, most search engines had veered completely away from reliance on meta elements. In July 2002, AltaVista, one of the last major search engines to still offer support, finally stopped considering them.
It is not an error; any number of meta tags may be used. But as #Nerd-Herd points out, keyword meta tags are hardly useful at all.
If you use such tags, there is usually no reason to use more than one of them per page, as it is simpler to write just <meta name="keywords" content="test1, test2">.
In theory, if you use keywords of different languages, then you have a reason to use more than one tag, because the language identification is per element, e.g.
<meta name="keywords" content="liberty" lang="en">
<meta name="keywords" content="liberté" lang="fr">
But this is just theoretical, since search engines probably ignore keyword meta tags, and almost surely ignore lang attributes in general.
Meta tags "description" and "keywords" are very important. They should be distinct for each page of website.
We read in "Google Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide"
Description meta tags are important because Google might use
them as snippets for your pages. Note that we say "might" because
Google may choose to use a relevant section of your page's visible
text if it does a good job of matching up with a user's query.
Adding description meta tags to each of your pages is always a good practice in case Google
cannot find a good selection of text to use in the snippet. -Page 6
Emphasise of theirs.
what meta-tags in the header of an (x)html page should be enough for SEO whitout overload it?
A few years back, meta tags were important to search engine optimization. However, they've been abused and are generally ignored by almost all search engines (including Google, Yahoo and Live search).
The most important tags for SEO that you can include in your (X)HTML are the <title> and <meta name="description"...> tags.
<title> should generally be what you'd want the search engine to name your page in it's listing.
<meta name="description"...> can sometimes give the search engine a basic idea of how to describe your page when
indexing it.
However, using these two tags will not necessarily make a difference in increasing your site's visibility on a search engines listings. For more information on that aspect, Google has a nice section on SEO on their site.
<meta name="description"> can be used to display a short summary of the site in search engine results, although that's not strictly ‘SEO’.
No others are necessary; in particular <meta name="keywords"> is a no-longer-relevant waste of your time.
Description tags though not critical for higher ranking are absolutely critical for true Search Engine Optimization. The goal is not solely to rank highly but to get traffic to your site and conversions. The Description since it is shown on the results is absolutely critical for that purpose. Title and Description are the key elements. Page content is the most critical.