Basic Essentials of Web Page Meta Tags

There are a lot of meta tags that can be used on a web page but not all of them are needed. The following are the essentials that should be used on all web pages.

Doc Type

The Doc type tells an HTML validator which version of HTML you are using. If you are still using some old HTML tags then use 4.01 transitional.

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

HTML Tag

The HTML tag contains the code that tells the browser how to load the page.

<html>

Head Tag

The head tag follows immediately after the HTML tag and contains information of interest to search engines and tells the browser how to load the web page. The information in the head tag is not displayed on the web page (except the title is displayed at the very top of your browser window and the description is often used by search engines). Some HTML programs provide a plethora of meta tags but only the following are really needed.

<head>

Title Tag

The title tag tells the visitor and search engine what your page is about. This is one of the most important factors for keyword ranking. Do not put the same title on every page or search engines will think every page has the same content. Put your most important keywords first in the title tag. (more info on the Title Meta Tag

<title> Your Title goes Here <title>

Description Tag

The description tag tells the search engine and visitor more information about the web page. Put about 2 sentences in this tag with your most important keywords in the front. It does not affect ranking but can encourage someone searching for information to check out your website.

<META NAME="description" CONTENT="Your Description Goes Here.">

Keyword Meta tag

Google doesn't use the keyword tag but some search engines still do. just put your most important keywords in this tag and the keywords have to be relevant to the page they are on.

<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="Your Keywords God here Separated by commas">

Base Href Meta tag

The Base Href tag will tell the browser which website to apply the links to if you are using relative URLS. If you use full urls in all navigation this tag will help prevent your website from being copied by scrapers. If it is copied the search engine can determine the true owner by looking at the base href tag. However, don't apply this tag until the page is totally done because the browser will look for the images and CSS style tags on your website instead of your computer. Apply the full url of the page.

<base href="Put the Full URL of the page here">

CSS Stylesheet Meta Tag

The CSS tag (Cascading Style Sheets) links to your CSS stylesheet where you can apply all formatting styles to text, images and other features on the page. The use of CSS saves a lot of code on the webpage itself and increases download time.

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="URL of your CSS file goes here.css">

Characterset Meta Tag

This tag tells the browser or search engine what character set to apply to your web page. If your page is in English use the following character set:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">

Robots Meta Tag

This tag tells the search engine what they can index and if they can follow the links. If you want them to just follow the links and not index the pages then include "noindex" and leave the "follow" tag as is.

<meta name="robots" content="index,follow">

No ODP

If you submitted your site to ODP or DMOZ.org with one title and description and later changed the focus of your website this tag tells Google to not use the ODP title and Description.

<meta name="googlebot" content="noodp">

Pop Out of Frames Script

Scrapers often copy web pages and put them in a frame to make it look like they have lots of pages on their website. This isn't a meta tag but it needs to go inside your head tag. It is a bit of Javascript that will force the visitor's browser to pop that page out of the frame. This is another reason to use full URLS on all navigation because if your page is scraped, if anyone clicks on the URLs on the other site they will still go to your website.

<script type="text/javascript">
if(top!= self) top.location.href = self.location.href
</script>

Closing Body Tag

This tells the browser the main content of the page has ended.

</body>

Closing HTML Tag

This tells the browser the HTML has ended.

</html>

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