Ever wondered where to begin with when optimizing for HTML meta tags for your website? Do you think Meta Keywords help in gaining rankings? Do you think that Meta Descriptions are useless because Google does not use them for ranking? Here is a quick snapshot for optimizing the head tags on a webpage.

• Title tag is your best friend. Not just it helps your pages rank well, also helps to catch user’s attention on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). Once you have done your homework with keywords, use the main keyword(s) as the first thing in the title. Brand name is important, but if it doesn’t have the keyword(s) in it add it after the keywords. Limit the length of the title tag to 60-65 characters including spaces and the dividers. Use dividers to seprate out the keywords and brand name. Once you have achived decent rankings, gather keyword data for that page to tweak and test variations of the keyword(s) to increase CTR or further rankings.

• Meta Description is not used by major search engines to calculate rankings. That does not mean meta descriptions are not helpful in getting traffic. In most cases meta descriptions are shown as the snippet below the title on SERPs. The snippet is a major factor which helps the search engine user decide if they want to click the URL or not. Meta Descriptions for your website should be less than 160 characters. It should describe the content of the page as accurately as possible. Adding information that is not on the page in your meta description may get you clicks, but will also increase the bounce rate and time on the site. It will hurt the brand reputation and may also effect rankings on SERPs. Keywords should be added to the meta description not for the rankings, but to gain more visibility and higher CTR. Search Engines bold the keywords which help user making decision on what link to click.

• Meta Keywords used to be a factor in rankings in the past. They are no longer used by any major search engine to generate rankings neither are they displayed anywhere on the SERPs. Yahoo! is the only search engine that uses meta keywords to discover content, but does not use for rankings. Since Yahoo search is going away, there won’t be any reason to add these tags after that. We recommend not to use the meta keyword tag because it does not have any SEO value at this time. One negative impact by adding meta keywords tag and filling it with your best keywords is that it gets super easy for your competitors to grab your keywords and start optimizing their website.

• Rel=Canonical is a very new meta tag which is honored by all the 4 major search enignes. It is a great asset for dynamically generated websites as they are prone to duplicate URLs for same content. We recomend adding this to your large/small website. However, don’t just solely rely on it, continue to have 301 redirects where needed. Testing over a period of 2 months, we found Rel=canonical does not always work as advertised.

• Meta Robots Tag is not required, but good to have. You should use <META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOODP, INDEX, FOLLOW”> for the pages you would like search engines to crawl and index. INDEX attribute tels search engines to index the page in their index, FOLLOW attribute tells search engines to follow the links on the page and NOODP tells search engines not to use snippets from Open Directory Project. If you see your page’s snippet which is not same as meta description, generally it is being picked from Dmoz. We came across a few CMS systems in the past which had “NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW” as the default for all the pages. Make sure if you are using a third party CMS this is not the case.