Meta Data, Meta Keyword Tag & Meta Description Tag

Now you are familiar about SEO from the last post. Now in this post let’s learn about Meta data, Meta keyword tag and Meta tag description tag.

Let's start with Meta data. Meta Data is composition of Meta keyword tag and meta description tag. Some important point for generating searching engine friendly Meta data, Meta keyword tag and Meta description tag are:


Meta Data

• Pages should have unique Meta description and Meta keyword tags.
• It is advisable to have default values used when no replacement data is available or to have meta data as a requirement for page publication.
• Sections of the site which produce many similar and dynamic pages are often Meta tagged through a template based system where one or more rules combines with another database look up. The template is populated with page specific information.
• Pages should support the robots Meta tag.
• The default content value for this tag is “follow, index” as this allows search engines into the page and allows spiders to follow links from it.
• There may be instances where a page should be kept out of the search engines and in these instances it should be possible to change the robots Meta tag to “follow, noindex”.

Meta Keyword Tag

• Although this tag is indexed, text appearing within it only has limited relevancy (since it is text that is hidden from the user) - far less than if the text simply appeared in the page content itself.
• It is only really useful to support (or validation) of on-page text - even its use as covering synonyms is limited; it is generally better to try to include synonyms into the main content.
• Roughly speaking, incidence of a keyword in the body text that also appears in the Keyword and/or Description tags can be considered in its equivalent effect as falling somewhere between if that keyword were in a tag and if it were in a tag.
• Like title tags, priority is from left to right, separated by commas. The primary keyword should always be first in the list, and keywords should never occur in the keyword tag unless they also appear in the page text.
  

Recommended Maximum Size: 100 characters, including punctuation.

Meta Description Tag

• Everything that applies to the Keyword tag also applies to this element.
• However because of the significantly lower recommended length, use should be limited to primary keywords only.
• Note that the description data can be used as the page description in search listing when no other information is available.
  

Recommended Maximum Size: 180 characters, including punctuation.