The current state of meta tags
December 5, 2007
Back in the day, meta tags were all the rage. Webmasters spent a lot of time crafting the perfect tags for the headers of their page that included keywords, descriptions and all sorts of other fancy tags that ultimately accomplished very little. Today, it’s an ongoing SEO urban myth that you need keyword meta tags on your pages.The truth is that some rogue search engines still use tags like the keyword tag but overall the engines that we really care about ignore them completely. Google has confirmed this.
You can feel free to use this tag on your pages and it will not count against you.For site designers interested in meta tags there are only two left that we need to be concerned about on a regular basis. Actually there’s really only one true meta tag, the other is the title tag. If you follow the link above you’ll see that there are instances where you might want to use meta tags for very specialized reasons but the bottom line is that you need to have a title tag with your keywords in it and a description meta tag that will show your site summary within the search listings.
If you’re not familiar with these tags I’ll provide an example of them below and you simply paste them somewhere between the HEAD tags in your html.
<title>The title of the page</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”A description of the page”>
Other meta tags of interest are as follows:
<meta name=”robots” content=”value here”>
<meta name=”googlebot” content=”value here”>
According to Google you can modify the value’s as follows:
- noindex: prevents the page from being included in the search engines
- nofollow: This tells the search engines to not follow links on this page when looking for new pages to crawl
- nosnippet: This will remove any snippets when the search results are shown for this page.
- noodp: Don’t use text from ODP (The Open Directory Project)
- noarchive: Don’t display a “cached” link for this page in the search results
- unavailable_after:[date]: remove this page from the search results after the specified date and time
I hope this quick start tidbit clears up a few things and helps you spend less time on building meta tags and more time on building great content and researching keywords that return real traffic. Using these keywords in your title, description and throughout your content should be your MAIN focus when dealing with SEO on your site.
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I can recommend you use seodigger.com for keyword tracking, just trace your best competitors keywords and positions in SERP, they’ve done all the work allready
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And try SeoQuake, seo toolbar. It can analyze anything you may need including keyword density on a page. https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/3036/ – for Firefox. seoquake.com – for IE.