Summersault Weblog

Meta Tag Types

Keywords
The KEYWORDS meta tag is used to list keywords and phrases related to your website. This list typically consists of around 25 words or less. It is not recommended that you use more than 25 words because many search engines will throw up a red flag at that point and consider your website to be abusing the KEYWORDS meta tag and will stop indexing your site.

The KEYWORDS meta tag, as with all meta tags is formatted with the following syntax:

Notice that each of the words under the “content� attribute are separated with a comma. For a real example, let’s say that we’re building a website about flowers. My keywords meta tag might looking something like this:

Notice I didn’t max out my 25-word limit. Don’t feel like you need to think as many words as possible. We’ll talk in later volumes about how there are better ways to use keywords in other areas of your site to attract search results. Keep in mind that unless someone views the source HTML of your page they’ll never actually see your KEYWORDS printed out on the screen.

Description
The DESCRIPTION tag is used to provide a one or two sentence description of what your website is about. There aren’t many guidelines to follow when creating your DESCRIPTION tag other than to keep it fairly brief. Most search engines will cut your description tag short if it’s too long, so it’s important to keep it concise and to the point.

One of the main differences between he KEYWORD and DESCRIPTION is that your DESCRIPTION is sometimes actually seen by search engine users when your site shows up in search results. You’ve probably seen something like this when you’ve done a search in Google:

FLORIST FLOWERS - Florist flower delivery and Virtual Flowers ...
Send Flowers (VirtualFlowers.Comâ„¢)- Welcome! We are the leading on-line florist you can trust to send flowers same day delivery of florist flower ...
www.virtualflowers.com/ - 14k - Jun 5, 2005 - Cached - Similar pages

The middle two lines in this chunk are actually the contents of the DESCRIPTION tag on the front page of the virtualflowers.com website. Here is what it looks like:

As you can see their description is a little long and therefore was cut short by Google. If I were developing this meta tag, I would have done something more like this:

Much more to the point and will not be cut short when it’s displayed in search results.

Pages: Previous | Next ( 1 2 3 )

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 7th, 2005 at 11:59 am and is filed under Website Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.