People say that the use of meta tags is dead, a useless addition to your website, but are they wrong? Meta tags continue to serve a useful purpose on all websites. Although not all search engines use these tags, they still contain extremely important information about your website and its content.

Meta tags not only tell a search engine spider about your website, they also provide instructions that tell the spider what you would like it to do and what not to do.

First, let’s see what meta tags tell us about your website:

The first tag in your meta tags should be your title tag, in my opinion this is the most important tag you can control. This tag must indicate your company and no more than 3 keywords that belong to that page. An example of this is

The keyword tag should be next in line for importance. This tag is pretty straightforward, however there are rules about how many keywords it should have. The general rule of thumb is around 10, but I recommend no more than 3 keywords. The reason for this is that the more keywords you have, the harder it is to keep the weighted average where it needs to be above 54%. It also becomes difficult to match the keywords on the site with the keyword meta tags. An example of this meta tag is

The third in succession should be your description tag, in this tag we want to describe the web page we are on, and again we have another chance to list our 3 keywords for this page. This is important, don’t overlook it. It is also essential to maintain the order in which the keywords appear. An example of this tag is

Now we are in the part of the tags that tell the search engine what you would like it to do with your website. These tags are also critical, as in some cases we can direct the spider through your web pages.

This tag tells the search engine that you would like it to visit your home page, follow all linked pages, and charge for all pages you go through. This is important because it allows the engine to store your site in its database.

In this tag we tell the spider to come back to our website every 7 days to look for more content. As a web page changes, the content needs to be re-indexed to be relevant. This label can help us with this point.

There are many more tags and more detailed information about the above tags, however I just wanted to give an overview of the importance of the above tags.