Meta Tag basics

[Andy Choopa]

What would you consider the crucial secrets to successfully Meta Tagging?

 

[djbaxter]

For SEO:

1. unique title tag for each page, maximum 65-75 characters (Google used to cut it off at 65 but now uses 70)
2. unique meta description tag for each page, maximum 150-200 characters (not used in ranking but may be used as the displayed snippet for search results depending on the search term)
3. for local search, geo tags help - the following are from one of my sites (space added after "<" so it will display in this post:
   • < meta name="geo.position" content="45.423494;-75.697933">
   • < meta name="geo.placename" content="Ottawa, Ontario, Canada">
   • < meta name="geo.region" content="Ontario-CA">
4. if you have listings in ODP/DMOZ or the Yahoo Directory (or hope to), use the following to ensure that search engines use your snippet and not the one in the directory:
   • < meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOODP">
   • < meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOYDIR">
5. no other meta tags matter for SEO

For consistent rendering across browsers:

1. Use an appropriate DOCTYPE declaration such as (space added after "<" for display):
   < !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"-->[/CODE]Note that DOCTYPE is inserted BEFORE the "head" tag.
2. Use an appropriate charset declaration such as (space added after "<" for display):
   < meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">

Other:

If you have a "favicon", use the following:

• < link REL="SHORTCUT ICON" HREF="favicon.ico">

That's pretty much it - anything else is filler.