Meta Tags - Right and Wrong

What to (and what not to) include?

[bid4abook]

Hi,
Can anyone point me in the right direction of what to include within the meta tags and is there a specific order? I have been checking out the competition and there seems to be no fixed what to (and what not to) include.
I have the following included within my home page and main pages:
<title>
<favicon>
<Rating>
<Distribution>
<Revisit>
<author>
<robots>
<copyright>
<description>
<keywords>
<netinsert>
<hover>

Is there a right and wrong?

[Corey Bryant]

Well you should include the <title>

Favicon is gravy IMO - something added to make the URL (address bar) look a bit better. Seems more and more sites are adding them.

The description and keywords and not used by most SEs but most people stil use them and some SEs will use the description in the search engine results.

The other ones, most people do not bother with them anymore - just adds more text to your website

-Corey

[etechsupport]

I hope google ignore Meta Tags but they have still some influence to determine a site contents for few other search engine,it's better to have them than not.

[harry_wales]

Title - necessary.
Description - makes your listing look better.
Keywords - now ignored by most SE's.

Adding more meta tags just pushes your first paragraph of REAL copy further down the page - making your page LESS relevant than those that don't use them.

IMHO

[stu2]

I would pass your pages thru an HTML checker and include whatever meta-tags it tells you are missing. The reason for doing this is to ensure your pages comply with current standards. IIRC, Google has some stuff in it's algo which checks for the "quality" of the page and may signal a minute negative to the page if it doesn't comply with current standards. The penalty might be so small as to be not noticeable, but every little bit helps. Besides, it can't be bad to comply with the standards :)

Of course, a good title is escential. Up to 66 characters for Google, IIRC. Should include your keywords. Personally I try to keep it short and pithy since it's also what apprears in the surfer's browser.

A good description is also (but less) important. Everything else is pretty much optional.

[Event_King]

yup agreed 100%. Title is THE most important one.

If you want a description then have one, but I'd ensure it matches most of your keywords that you have in your title.

Keywords are ignored by most engines and I'm puzzled why I was approached by yet another SEO guy claiming they are vital to the success of my website.

(: sigh.

[bid4abook]

Many thanks one and all (how very Charles Dickens, it is xmas after all!). I will trim the tree, or is that root :-)Regards.

[Don_Hoagie]

Other than my following comments, I agree with everyone else here...

Does no one else find that Yahoo still cares about the keyword meta tags? I have two sites that are on the front page of Yahoo's results for several phrases that are in my meta tags, but are repeated NOWHERE in my content. Anyone care to explain how that is due to something other than the meta tag?

[Animated]

care about just the "Description"

[httpwebwitch]

use <title>, and two flavours of <meta>: keywords and description.

Ignore/remove the rest.

And yes, put up a favicon so you don't get bogged with failed requests for it (esp. from Firefox)

[encyclo]

One possibly vital meta tag not mentioned above is the meta charset tag. Unless you are defining the charset elsewhere (usually a HTTP header) you should always declare the character encoding with a meta charset tag placed before any text (and that includes the title tag). This is not only vital for validation but also correct parsing by both spiders and browsers.

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

(Replace ISO-8859-1 with your page's encoding if you using a different charset.)

Once that in place, the the meta description is very useful and the meta keywords tag is at worst harmless.

[bid4abook]

encyclo
Many thanks for that, it just so happens that I have been redesigning my site (again!). I will be including the charset/ISO. Many thanks for the pointers.
Regards.

[tedster]

Here's a good Library thread on the topic:

Meta tags and more - from <head> to </head> [webmasterworld.com]

[annej]

The meta description is being used by Google as the snippit under the site title on search engine results pages if the description isrelated to the search word or phrase. So you want to make them interesting and include your main keywords for the page. It seems Google shows about 150 characters and spaces so use that as a guide in how long to make them.