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What are Meta tags and how are they related to SEO?

Written by businessideas.info

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Let us start with what are Meta tags. Meta tags are special HTML Tags present in the head section of an html page. Although this tag is not visible on the resultant page, BUT It's visible to the web agents OR the search engine crawlers. Previously most of the search engines including YAHOO use to consider this as the most important criteria for giving a position in a search listing, although due to the heavy misuse of these tags now they are giving less importance to this tag but it doesn't mean that it's not useful. 

v  Power of Meta tags
META Tags are used to get the information regarding the content of the page, When it will expire, who is the author, language of the content etc.. Meta tags can also be used to make an indexable OR non-indexable by a search engine. By using META tad you can tell the search engine crawler weather to follow the links in the page OR not. It gives the Browser the information about the character set used in that page

v  Example of Meta tags
Now let me show you an example of how a meta tag is used in a page under the head tag. The following are the most common used tags used for SEO.

<head>
<meta name="description" content="A short description of the content on the page">
<meta name="keywords" content="Keywords which are used and are related to the content of the page">
<meta name="abstract" content="a very small description">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content=" language of the content in the page">
<meta name="revisit-after" content="tells the spider to revisit the page after how many days ">
<meta name="robots" content="FOLLOW,INDEX ">
<meta name="Pragma" CONTENT="no-cache ">
<meta name="copyright" content="details about the copyright of the content">
<meta name="author" content="email OR name of the content author/webmaster">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
</head> 

 

  • Meta Description

<meta name="description" content="A short description of the content on the page">

This tag provides the content description to search engine spider which it uses in the listing of the search results Let me show you an example how search engine uses it

 Website description meta tag

You can see the description of the home page for google.com in the Google search engine, above, and the same thing for yahoo.com in the Yahoo! search engine, below. 

 Yahoo description meta tag

The recommended length of this tag is about 150 characters. If the description is longer than this length then the search engine place an ( .... ) after 150 characters and hence it's not recommended. It also gives a good amount of information to the crawler about the page and the content and hence it is a very important tag and should be used properly. Stuffing a few keywords in the Meta description tag is a good step towards SEO but the tag should not be spammed and a proper grammar should be used.

  • Meta Keywords :

<meta name="keywords" content="Keywords which are used and are related to the content of the page">

The tag provides the information about the keywords that should target this page OR in simple terms the search terms should list this page in the search result, So you can guess how important this tag is ALTHOUGH this is not the only criteria which search engines uses, moreover currently most of the search engines are giving least OR no importance to this tag BUT it's still  specially in case of yahoo and MSN .Google gives a very little consideration to this tag.

Now how to select a keyword for you page?
Let's take an example .You have written an article about "growth of mobile phones in recent years" and you used the a word "mobile phones" several times in the article .Hence adding this in the meta keyword tag will be a good idea and it might give you a good rank for this search term.
Although multiple tags can be used but one should not spam it. Approximately 25 terms can be used (comma separated) and a maximum of 1000 characters is recommended.

  • Meta Abstract :

<meta name="abstract" content="a very small description ">

 

The abstract tag is a similar tag to description BUT differs in the length. It's short description of the content in the page. Although it's not very important BUT search engine uses this tag for achieving and classifying pages.

  • Meta Content Launguage :

<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content=" language code of the content in the page">

Articles on the web are available in various language and you must have noticed that Google includes all the languages in their search result.
Although it's not a important meta tag if your page is in English BUT there's no harm keeping it as it gives more information to the crawler and helps it classifying it.
BUT if your page is in some other language (other than English) then this META TAG may help you getting a better rank in regional search engines.
To use this tag place the language code on the content=" --" .Multiple languages can be used by separating them by a coma.

Example and codes for common languages in web

<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content=" EN">

English

<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content=" HI">

Hindi

<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content=" FR">

French

<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content=" BN">

Bengali/Bangla

<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content=" AR">

Arabic

<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content=" ZN">

Chinese

<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content=" TR">

Turkish

<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content=" UR">

Urdu

<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content=" SK">

Slovak

<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content=" RU">

Russian

<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content=" PL">

Polish

<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content=" NL">

Dutch

<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content=" JA">

Japanese

 

  • Meta "Revisit After" :

<meta name="revisit-after" content="tells the spider to revisit the page after how many days ">

 

This tag informs the search engine spider about how often he should reindex /crawl that page. Currently most of the search engine dosen't give any importance to this tag. BUT there's no harm using it .Generally the time period should be 14 days or more.

  • Meta Robots :

<meta name="robots" content="FOLLOW,INDEX ">

This tag tells the crawler weather to index the page or not.It also tells the crawler weather to follow the links in the page and continue indexing.
It can provide 6 different instruction to the crawler namely : index,follow (all)/noindex,nofollow (none)
Let's get into details

The instruction "index" tells the crawler to index the page and "follow" tells the crawler to follow the links in the page an continue the indexing BOTH collectively can be used as

<meta name="robots" content="FOLLOW,INDEX ">

OR

<meta name="robots" content="all ">

Very Similarly

The instruction "noindex" tells the crawler to NOT TO index the page and "nofollow" tells the crawler NOT TO to follow the links in the page an continue the indexing BOTH collectively can be used as

<meta name="robots" content="NOFOLLOW,NOINDEX ">

OR

<meta name="robots" content="none ">

 

v Other Meta tags

The following are the other meta tags which are not important in SEO point of view but are useful.

  • Meta pragma

<meta name="Pragma" CONTENT="no-cache ">

It tells the browser whether to cache the page in the hardisk OR not.If the page updatese very frequently the use "no-cache" so that the browser can always reload OR use "cache" if you want the browser to cache the page.

  • Meta Copyright

<meta name="copyright" content="details about the copyright of the content">

It provides the copyright information to the search engine crawler /Agent /browser

  • Meta Author

<meta name="author" content="email OR name of the content author/webmaster">

Provides information about the author of the content in that page.The information can be used by a person / search engine crawler /Agent.

  • Meta Content-Type

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">

It tells the search engine crawler and the browser about the encoding type of the page.
 
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