Meta Description Tag
Though meta description tags are not a major factor search engines consider when ranking sites, they should not be left off the page. Both the meta keywords tag and the meta description tag contribute to your search engine ranking, and the meta description tag influences the liklihood that a person will actually click on the search engine results page and visit your site.The meta description tag is intented to be a brief and concise summary of your page's content. Think of the Yahoo! directory. You see your site title followed by a brief description of your site or business. The meta description tag is designed to provide a brief description of your site which can be used by search engines or directories. The meta description tag takes the following form:
<meta name="description" content="Brief description of the contents of your page.">
When you write a meta description tag, you should limit it to 170 characters or 200 characters at most. You should pick a style and be consistent throughout your pages, writing a unique description for each page of your site. The Open Directory (DMOZ) also a detailed guide to writing descriptions.The key is that you want your description according to W3C standards and be relevant to the content of the page. Again, it is intended to provide a brief summary of the contents of the page.
Meta Keywords Tag
A meta keywords tag is supposed to be a brief and concise list of the most important themes of your page. The meta keywords tag takes the following form:<meta name="keywords" content="keywords, keyword, keyword phrase, etc.">
When you write a meta keywords list, start by scanning the copy on your page. Make a list of the most important terms you see on the page. Then read through the list. Pick the 10 or 15 terms that most accurately describe the content of the page. If you can't narrow your keyword list down to 10-15 keywords, then the content on your page may be rambling to far. Because of the hyper-competitiveness of the current search engine placement landscape, pages need to be very focused on one or two specific keyword phrases in order to have a chance to get a top ten placement. For example, a page about Blogger tips and Worpress Tips doesn't have much of a chance to win for either "Blogger tips" or "Worpress tips." To have any chance to win, you need to have one page about blogger tips and one page about Worpress Tips.
Another example: If your page is a list of exercise or fitness tips, and on the page you list tips for things to do before, during, and after a workout, then you need to think to yourself, "what 10 or 15 words or phrases is this page MOST about?" Just because your page mentions dieting in the text doesn't mean that the page is about dieting. If you want to win for dieting, then create a page about dieting. The ultimate example of a page which is focused and ready for search engine optimization is a page from an encyclopedia. Each page is brief, focused, and has just one theme.
The Doctype
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd”>Is the DOCTYPE, it’s not a meta tag and it’s not essential you add this to a page for good search engine placement, but if you want a page to validate in a HTML validator (i.e. http://validator.w3.org/) you’ll need to add the right one.
Robots Meta Tag
There are dozens of other meta tags, but hardly any of them are any use to us for improving search engine ranking. The most important one you may need sometime is the Robots Meta Tag which looks like this-<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow”>
It can be used to prevent search engine spiders access to individual web pages.
Here’s what you can put in the robots meta tag-
<meta name=”robots” content=”index,follow”> Index the page and follow all links from it. If this is what you want don’t use the robot meta tag at all since by default search engine spiders do this anyway.
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,follow”> Don’t index (cache) this page, but do follow the links. Some webmasters who are using black hat SEO techniques use this to try to hide their shady techniques (i.e. cloaking)!
<meta name=”robots” content=”index,nofollow”> Index this page, but don’t follow the links.
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow”> Don’t index the page and don’t follow the links. Use this on pages you don’t want the search engines to have anything to do with.
