Meta Elements
Meta Elements are the most important parts of a webpage that enable search engine crawler to index your page in order to be able to visit your page at a regular interval. Meta Elements consist of different parts such as:
- Title Tag
- Meta Description
- Meta Keyword
Title
The Title Tag is an HTML tag that describes a specific webpage. It is the gateway to the webpage for the users. Title element becomes the link for the visitors to the web page found in search engine listing. It is written inside the “head” part of the web content.
The Title is displayed by the browser at the top of the browser window. From the title of a page visitors can have the idea of location of the website. It not only identifies the text of the document but also has an effect on Search Engine Result Page.
The Title Element is probably the most important page element that influences the page ranking of a site. Major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN consider the Titles of the WebPages for relevance and assign ranking. Titles have their importance as the resource directory editors and webmasters use the title to link to any webpage.
Apart from being focused a title should be well worded. They should follow certain guidelines like-
- All title should be in title case.
- It should clearly indicate what is available in the page.
- Title should include most important keywords embedded logically. Better to keep the most important information in the beginning.
- Title should be unique for each page and appealing according to the content.
- It can be of 70-80 characters.
- It should contain less number of stopwords.
Meta Description:
Meta descriptions are the HTML elements of the web pages that provide the summary of the web page. They are the information written inside the “head” tag in the source code of web page. They give the search engine predefined gist of the web page content. The information written in Meta Description part is meant for search engine spider and not for the general visitors.
Earlier Meta Descriptions were being considered to be important from search engine indexing point of view. However, now they have a little relevance in Search Engine Result Page Ranking. Meta description part is important as the search engine results show the Meta description tag from which the reader can have the idea of the content. It is an integral part of page development and document identification.
Meta Description is a unique feature of each and every page of a website. It should not be of more than 150 characters including space. If it exceeds than that the Search Engine Result Page will not be able to display the full text. The keywords or keyword phrases of the web page should be included into the Meta Description Tag.
Meta Keyword Tag:
Meta Keywords are the keywords or keyword phrases that a webmaster would like the search engines to search in his WebPages. It provides additional text for crawler based search engines to index along with the body text. The Meta Keywords Tag is a list of most important terms of a webpage. Meta Keywords Tags are kept in source of the document.
Meta Keyword Tags were considered important to get a page being listed under certain keywords in search engines. However, major search engines these days ignore this tag and give more importance to content.
While creating Meta Keyword Tag the important things that need to be considered is-
- Choosing relevant keywords
- Creating title and Meta description tag with the keywords
- Writing content based on these keywords
Guidelines:
- Key words should of less than 250 characters.
- Important keywords and keyword phrases should be used.
- Keywords should be specific and accurate.
- There should be minimal repetition of individual work.