Tuesday, December 8, 2009

Rules for META Tags on Your Website

By nick halmond

While the use of META keywords has been largely criticized, and is now no longer necessary, the use of other META tags is still extremely valuable. Namely, using META title and META description tags is great for SEO. You can significantly improve your rankings and your overall SEO efforts by using these tags, and using them properly on all of your websites. Take a look at these instructions for how to make the most out of the META title and description tags.

Before taking a look at these rules, it's first important to go back to the META keywords issue for a moment. As mentioned, their usage and value has been criticized and questioned for years. Now, both Google and Yahoo! have publicly stated that they don't even use META keywords for your webpage's ranking. That means you shouldn't use them either, and you should quit wasting your time with them.

That doesn't mean you should stop all of your work with META tags however. As mentioned, the META title tag is still very important for SEO. Your META title tag is what gets displayed at the top of a page, in the browser bar window and is also what gets displayed when your site is shown in the search engine results.

While you shouldn't waste your time with META keywords anymore, you can still include your primary keywords in your META title tag. This is a great way to help rank for a particular search term or query, and it will definitely help your overall SEO. An important factor however is to not keyword stuff, and to keep your length short. Your META title should be no more than 65 characters long because anything more than that gets cutoff.

The META description tag is also still very important for SEO. The description tag is what will be displayed under your title when your page is viewed in the results of the search engines. This is another spot that you can include some keywords and phrases. The length for the description should be approximately 150-160 characters or less.

As you can see, with both the META title and description tags the length of your included text is very important. Keeping them short and sweet will go a long way towards helping your SEO. Also, as mentioned, be sure to avoid keyword stuffing and instead focus on including just a few of your most important keywords on any particular page.

A decade ago it seemed that META keywords were the most important SEO factor. Then as time went on, it became gradually less important, and now it's not used at all. That's the way that the world of SEO works. Now, the META title and description tags have gained great importance to helping your ranking. So include them on all of your pages and use them properly to see great SEO results.

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