I wanted to start SEO week out with some basics, so the first thing on the agenda is Meta Tags. It is a really easy thing to add to your blog or website, but it is super important.
What is a Meta Tag?
Meta tags are html tags that are used to describe your site or blog to search engine. The most common and important tags are the title tag, description tag, keyword tags, revisit-after tag, and the robots tag.
Why are Meta Tags important?
Meta tags are important because they convey to google, yahoo, bing, etc. what your site is all about. When you search for something, the search engine is searching for keywords found on different sites. When you get a list of search results, your meta tags help determine what comes up. The first example shown is my other blog (I have already used meta tags in it).
This second example is what this blog looks like when you don’t have Meta Tags (I only put meta tags up last night, so they don’t show up yet):
If you noticed, on the “Makin’ Cute Blogs” search, it grabbed code off my sidebar, and it looks terrible. If someone is searching out different sites and this is what they get for the description, they are not going to be likely to click on it. So be very thoughtful about what you say in your description.
How do You Make Meta Tags?
So Easy! Here is snapshot of what mine looks like.
I have put together the different meta tags for you to copy and use:
The Description Meta Tag is what you want your readers to know about your website, this is probably the most important tag.
<meta name='description' content='PUT YOUR DESCRIPTION HERE'/>
The Title Tag is just that, your blog or website’s title.
<title>YOUR TITLE HERE</title>
The Keywords Meta Tag are the keywords that you want search engines to associate with your site.
<meta name='keywords' content='PUT YOUR KEYWORDS HERE'/>
The Robots Meta Tag tells search engines what to index on your site. I assume that you want them to index your entire site, so here is the tag for that (make no changes to this one).<meta name='robots' content='index, follow'/>
The Revisit-After Meta Tag tells the search engines how many days before you want them to revisit your site. With a blog this is especially important, because you want them to revisit frequently if you are adding posts often. **Change the “X” to how many days you want to pass before a search engine revisits your site. <meta name='Revisit-After' content='X days'/>
The Abstract Meta Tag is similar to the description tag, but just shorter. It is a one liner summary of your blog or website. Not all search engines look for it, but some do, so it can’t hurt :)<meta name='abstract' content='SHORT SUMMARY HERE'/>
The Author Meta Tag is great if your name is attached to what your blog or website is about. It attaches an Author to your blog or website.<meta name='author' content='PUT YOUR NAME HERE'/>
The Copyright Meta Tag declares any copyright information that you wish to disclose about your blog or website.<meta name='description' content='PUT YOUR DESCRIPTION HERE'/>
The Distribution Meta Tag states where you want your blog or website distributed, there are 3 option “Global”, “Local”, or “IU” (IU=internal use, only use this if you don’t want anyone to see your blog, which I am sure if you are doing all is isn’t the case :).<meta name='distribution' content='PUT WHAT TYPE OF DISTRIBUTION YOU WANT HERE(GLOBAL, LOCAL, OR IU)'/>
The Language Meta Tag really only useful if you have a non-english, or multiple language site (but it is great for those 2 uses). It declares what language your site uses. Here’s a list of the language codes:
BG (Bulgarian)
CS (Czech)
DA (Danish)
DE (German)
EL (Greek)
EN (English)
EN-GB (English-Great Britain)
EN-US (English-United States)
ES (Spanish)
ES-ES (Spanish-Spain)
FI (Finnish)
HR (Croatian)
IT (Italian)
FR (French)
FR-CA (French-Quebec)
FR-FR (French-France)
IT (Italian)
JA (Japanese)
KO (Korean)
NL (Dutch)
NO (Norwegian)
PL (Polish)
PT (Portuguese)
RU (Russian)
SV (Swedish)
ZH (Chinese)<meta name='Content-Language' content='PUT YOUR 2 LETTER CODE HERE'/>
The Copyright Meta Tag declares any copyright information that you wish to disclose about your blog or website.<meta name='description' content='PUT YOUR DESCRIPTION HERE'/>
How do You Install Your Meta Tags?
Super Easy! Just go to your “Edit HTML” and paste them directly beneath your <head>. On a website, put it anywhere in your Head section.
