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Which Meta Tags are most important to the SEO.

The following list rate as the most important of meta tags to the SEO and should appear in each HTML document. Note that we include the Html tag <TITLE></TITLE> in this list:

<title>Some Page Title</title>
<meta name="description" content="Some Page Description">
<meta name="keywords" content="Some, Page, keywords, ">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">

These special tags are almost exclusively used by web page search software. Those who practice Seo and do understand and use meta tags have long known that these are valid tools for providing various search engines with exact data they seek.

This gives the appearance that the skillful seo is able to influence the results offered by the search engines with some lofty magical skills. It is really not a trick with smoke and mirrors more than it is just that these gentlemen know how to best prepare their web page more efficiently than most by providing the search engines and internet browsers with what they expect to find.

Yet, not everyone agrees. You will still find web pages on the internet that tell you Keywords are unimportant for web page discovery (and always check to see if the person who offers this advice actually follows their own advice, if only I had a penny for each of them that don't).

This datum of omitting keywords might be somewhat true of Bing and Google, but who is to say that these engines do not make some use of your suggested meta tag keywords? And any of the many other search engines that do use the keyword tag may undergo a meteoric rise overnite in pubic opinion and popularity and where will that leave you then?

Yahoo was still fond of the KeyWord meta tag through to 2010. Yahoo's results are now heavily influenced by Bing's search algorithm. We are yet to see if a new meta engine will rise to take Yahoo's former number one place for meta search.

A Pizza Yeast Seo example

Let's expand on the KeyWords tag. This should correctly state the exact common words (and/or phrases) you have used regarding the specific subject matter of your page. If your page discusses pizza dough, your keywords may also include terms such as salt, yeast, improver etc. but you would not include toppings as a keyword unless that page also caters to composing the pizza product. A meta search for pizza + yeast then easily locates your exact page on the subject.

But as we have just noted, search engines may elect to scour your content and create their own keyword list for the page. But will omitting your own keywords still work in Google?

Let's demonstrate this with a google search for pizza yeast seo [AU, UK, US] and you will probably find this page very high in the serp list in any regional google search. We have not used the words or phrase of pizza yeast in our meta tag data (you can check to be sure). The reason is that Google is very efficient with their Keyword collection and we have also used an uncommon grouping of words. Should a quality pizza yeast seo product become a common item for purchase or on sale, we would expect there would be more competition which would mean we would need to further optimize our page to get listed a little higher. Adding those words into the tag might be enough.

And so the focus of this module is the Meta Tag portion of your document. And we have seen that we don't really need to bother about these tags because we can still get a good ranking.