Description and Keywords Meta Tags

A short explanation about using the Description and Keywords Meta Tags in a efficient way.

Meta tags provide information about a given web page to help search engines categorize them correctly.

META Description

The description attribute is supported by most major search engines, provides a concise explanation of a web page's content, often it appears in Google search results to describe the link.

Just write a sentence of about 150-200 characters that includes some keywords, need to be all in one line without any carriage return or line break.

META Keywords

According to what it say the Wikipedia...

The keywords attribute was popularized by search engines such as Infoseek and AltaVista in 1995, and its popularity quickly grew until it became one of the most commonly used meta elements. By late 1997, however, search engine providers realized that information stored in meta elements, especially the keyword attribute, was often unreliable and misleading, and at worst, used to draw users into spam sites. (Unscrupulous webmasters could easily place false keywords into their meta elements in order to draw people to their site.)

Search engines began dropping support for meta data 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.

No consensus exists whether or not the keywords attribute has any impact on ranking at any of the major search engines today. It is speculated that it does, if the keywords used in the meta can also be found in the page copy itself. With respect to Google, thirty-seven leaders in search engine optimization concluded in April 2007 that the relevance of having your keywords in the meta-attribute keywords is little to none. However, the same article also suggests that Yahoo still makes use of the keywords meta tag in some of its rankings. Yahoo itself claims support for the keywords meta tag in conjunction with other factors for improving search rankings.

even if are not sure about the importance of the keywords, here there are some tips which can be helpful.

Writing

Write a string of keywords of maximum 1000 charaters, separate keywords by commas, need to be all in one line without any carriage return or line break.

Keywords Choice

  • Pretend you are searching the web for sites that have themes similar to your site.
  • List keywords you think people might typically use.
  • Include popular synonyms of your keywords.
  • Include common misspellings of the keywords.
  • Have short phrases (two or three words) as well as single words between the commas.
  • Make nouns plural to catch both singular and plural words.
  • Include Description words in the keywords.
  • Use keywords that can also be found in the page itself.

Keyword Repetition

  • Search engines check for repetitions of words and penalize pages that have high repetition rates.
  • Do not enter keywords more than once or twice.
  • Words in phrases should not also be entered as individual words.

Keyword Order

  • The meta tag keyword list is ordered in importance from left to right.
  • Add keywords that are unique to the page to the beginning of the meta tag list.
  • Then end the list with keywords that are unique to your site.

 

Danilo