meta tags and keywords

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meta tags and keywords

humpingdan

5:03 pm on Mar 5, 2004 (gmt 0)

what are the correct meta tags to put into the header of may pages, were talking SEO wise genrally, what is the best order for them to go in, which should i include or steer away from?

any suggestions would be most greatful!

Dan

grahamstewart

5:46 pm on Mar 5, 2004 (gmt 0)

Typically speaking my document head tends to look something like this...


<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd"> 
<html lang="en"> 
<head> 
  <title>Widgets-R-US</title> 
  <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"> 
  <meta http-equiv="Content-Style-Type" content="text/css"> 
  <meta name="keywords" content="widgets,grommits,sale,repair"> 
  <meta name="description" content="We specialise in widget and grommit retail."> 
  <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="all" href="/styles/main.css"> 
  <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="print" href="/styles/print.css"> 
</head>

The first two meta-tags specify the character set and mime types used in the document. They are recommended by the w3c.

The next two (keywords and description) are the tags for Search Engines and directories. There is debate about whether the keywords tag is that useful anymore, but it doesn't do any harm.

Some search engine will place the text of your description next to your entry in search results.

keyplyr

8:50 pm on Mar 5, 2004 (gmt 0)

I only use title, description and a very short (10 words) keywords, in that order.

Everything else is either deprecated or can be put somewhere else.

The less HTML the better!