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.
Related
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'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.
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.
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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)
I encountered many sites including stackoverflow.com whose page source do not show META tags like keywords, description.
I am just wandering is it because they blocked it by some sort of tech or they just drop them since, as I know, those tags are not so much valuable as before.
If they blacked them, then what kind of software or tech do they need. If not then how Google extract description from those sites when Google displays search results?
Lot of dumb questions, thanks for your time and reply!
Any input is appreciated!
They're not MATA tags, they're META tags. They are not as important as the actual content of your site and the other sites that link to yours, since it's well known that meta tag content is easier to abuse and misrepresent. Meta elements are more useful in the areas where there is no benefit from such abuse, eg. content encoding or language, but some of this data can be sent by the web server in the HTTP headers anyway. So you rarely, if ever, need any meta elements.
You don't need any sort of technology to 'block' meta tags. Every tag is just a bit of text you insert into your HTML. If you don't want to send out a meta tag, you just don't write it into the HTML.
If you want specific information on how Google views your site then you could start with their webmasters page.
Just had a look around on Google .. may be followings help you something.
Avoid the META keyword tag!
Do not use the meta keywords tag. Many
people still think of this as a quick
fix for SEO. It’s not. Google no
longer uses it. In fact, it is likely
that Google penalizes sites that do
employ the meta keywords tag. Yahoo is
perhaps the only search engine that
still uses the meta keywords tag but
places very little weight on it.
Death of META Tag
pretty old link though
"In the past we have indexed the meta
keywords tag but have found that the
high incidence of keyword repetition
and spam made it an unreliable
indication of site content and
quality. We do continue to look at
this issue, and may re-include them if
the perceived quality improves over
time," said Jon Glick, AltaVista's
director of internet search.