Shoe String SEO

What are Metatags?

Ok first off i should explain what metatags even are if you haven't heard the term before.

Metatags are information about the web page you're looking at. If you 'view source' on a web page sometimes you will see a section at the top withing the HEAD tags that has a tag called META in it. This will then have a name attribute which will usually be keywords, description or title. This is then followed by another attribule called content.

All this stuff is designed for non-humans to be able to tell what the page is about and was originally what search engines used to determine the topic and content of your page. Unfortunately these tags (especially meta name='keywords') was abused so spammers would fill this information with completely irrelevant data just to get them to show up in search engines for anything.

So i shouldn't use them then?

Since then most search engines have stopped placing much weight (in terms of how they effect a page's ranking) on metatags. But that doesn't mean they're completely useless.

Google still uses the title tag and often takes exerts from the description tag. MSN (Bing) and Yahoo still use the data to an extent too.

So you're saying i should use them then

The simplest answer is: Yes you should but keep them relevant. You don't actually NEED to have the keywords metatag at all and it certainly won't hurt your low cost seo campaign. As with any seo the rule is: Keep it relevant and don't be tempted to spam. Make your title tags relevant and you meta name='title' as explained in my last article. You're only risking ranking penalties by making irrelevant or spammy metatag.

Also try and keep them unique per page. Each page should be about something different to reflect that in the metatags and title

Ok thats all for now