Meta Tags

[Barney McGrew]

Can someone give as near as damn it a difinitive answer on how Meta Tags should be formatted. I have spent hours looking around and get conflicting information on which should be useed and how they should be written, eg keywords with or without commas, should the author be included, how many words and keywords are allowed.

Any help would be appreciated or at least a solid link to a reputable site that gives it correctly.

[sarahA]

Can't say if it's a definitive answer but the SEO bloke I work with on a client's site separates keywords/phrases with commas, description is around 150-180 characters long, keywords I believe could be up to 900 so I doubt you'd ever fill that. Description and keywords should be unique per page if you're going to use them. Google will read the description, Yahoo will read both (although how much weight it places on them who knows).

There's no harm in adding Author, Copyright etc. We also usually have

Code:

<meta name="robots" content="index, noodp" />

<meta name="distribution" content="global" />
<meta name="rating" content="general" />

<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en-gb" />
<meta http-equiv="Content-Style-Type" content="text/css" />
<meta http-equiv="imagetoolbar" content="no" />
<meta http-equiv="imagetoolbar" content="false" />
<meta name="MSSmartTagsPreventParsing" content="true" />

Again no harm in having them providing you don't change the robots meta tag to include nofollow!

[suedenem]

Meta tags provide additional information about the page, so use what's appropriate to the document.

The SEs place so little weight on meta information that I wouldn't bother trying to SEO them, other than the description which in certain circumstances Google uses for the excerpt in SERPs and keywords which are often used by directories for categorisation.

Other than that, just use what you feel is pertinent to the document.

[Mike@TheWhippinpost]

WHS