This post is second in the series Basic SEO guide for Beginners

META Tags help to briefly inform the Search Engines about the content on the page. It does not have much of a ranking relevance today. When Search Engines first started crawling the web, they paid close attention to the META Tags and even blindly took into account what the tags provided.

Three tags that you should be looking forward to optimize are:

1. The Title tag (explained in the previous post)
2. Meta Description and Keywords Tags
3. The Robots Tag

META Description

<META name="description" content ="Short description about page content">

Things to remember

• Keep the META description length below 160 characters
• Make it human friendly and not keyword spammy
• Place 2 or 3 keywords that are repeated the most in the content and has maximum relevancy
• Optimal keyword density in Meta description: less than 10%

META Keywords

META Keywords are quite pointless since Search Engines generate it’s own set of relevant keywords for each page crawled. But if you are planning to add the Meta keywords tags, be sure to follow the guidelines given below.

<META name="keywords" content ="keyword1,keyword2,keyword3">

Things to remember

• Do not make a script to automatically insert the same keywords into each and every page. Make unique keywords for each page.
• Never put keywords that are absent on the page
• List 5-10 of the most frequently occurring keywords, separated with commas
• Do not repeat the same keyword multiple times. This is regarded spammy

META robots tag

The META Tag “robots” is also important as improper configuration of the Tag can lead to SEs not indexing the page. You may safely leave out the robots meta tag completely.

<meta name="robots" content="index, follow" />

The following can be used for ‘content’ attribute:

Attributes
index:    Index the current page
noindex:  Do not index the page
follow:   Follow links contained in the page
nofollow: Do not follow links

For properly managing META tags on your Wordpress posts, try the ‘All in one SEO Pack‘.

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