Head Tags
Head tags are placed in the beginning of a website page. They serve to inform the search engine of various page attributes. The most common tags include the Title Tag and Meta Tags. Meta Tags are further segmented into:
- Meta description
- Meta keyword
- Meta robot
- Meta refresh
Title Tag – The Title Tag displays in the title bar of a browser window. It serves as a short website page description. Of all the head tags, the Title Tag is the most important for organic optimization. Search Engines and directories use a website page Title Tag in their listings. Because the Title Tag is short (classically less than 67 characters), the words used must be concise and specific to that page. It is this characteristic that makes the Title Tag so important to search engines.
Search engines like Google examine the Title Tag from a keyword density point of view. More words in the title reduce the keyword density and have a negative affect on keyword phrase rankings.
Meta Description – The Meta Description tag is a long description of the page. Although this tag is not shown anywhere on a website page, search engines and directories commonly use the Meta Description tag as a more detailed and verbose page description.
Because of its length, Google and other search engines place only minor organic optimization emphasis on the Meta Description. A strong description tag, however, has other marketing advantages. Keywords matching a search query will have BOLD formatting. As such, users will be more likely to click on a search engine listing containing their keyword. Meta Description tags should be less than 30 words (approximately 160 characters). | Meta Keyword – This tag is a list of keyword phrases separated by comas. Although this tag at one time played a significant role in early search engines algorithms, all major search engines have now stated that this tag has minimal ranking influence.
The Meta Keyword tag may be relatively long. However, best practices suggest the tag be limited to 10-15 keywords.
Meta Robots Tag – This tag is instructional only. It instructs robots or search engine crawlers to either stop or proceed. The two most common instructions are:
<…CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">
and
<…CONTENT="INDEX, FOLLOW">
The first instruction requests that a search engine exclude a page from its index. Likewise, the second instruction informs the robot to continue. It should be noted that search engines are not required to obey these instructions. They may choose to crawl a website page even with “NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW” instructions.
Meta Refresh Tag – This tag can be very dangerous. A Meta Refresh tag direct a visitor to another website page. If the re-direction is set too fast, visitors never have a chance to see the contents of the first page. A search engine crawls and ranks content that visitors never see. In this case, a search engine may consider the page as SPAM.
There are, however, legitimate uses of the Meta Refresh tag. In these cases, Google has suggested a time of 5 or more seconds to avoid potential SPAM penalties. Next>> Body Content Get PDF>> |
Head Tags used in the home page of www.positionresearch.com: <head> <title>Organic Search Engine Optimization Professionals</title> <meta name="description" content="Position Research is a San Diego based professional
Search Engine Optimization company with 9 years of SEO experience; specializes
in both organic optimization and PPC management. Call 760-480-8291 today for
a free quote!" /> <meta name="keywords" content="professional organic search engine optimization,professional
organic optimization,organic optimization professional,organic optimization,
organic earch engine optimization,san diego professional organic optimization,
professional rganic optimization san diego,san diego organic optimization,
organic optimization an diego,ca professional organic optimization,
professional organic optimization ca" /> <meta name="robots" content="index, follow" /> |
