Gay Webmaster .com

META tags defiantly are not what they used to be. Just a couple of years ago, a good META description and keyword tags were the ticket to high traffic for many sites; and many spammers.

That is the problem: META tags were so easy to lie about they become utterly usless.

But META tags are back in a big way� at least with some search engines. Depending on your site design and technology, good META tags may be one route to improved search engine rank and traffic.

META Character Encoding:

To avoid unexpected display problems you must declaring the character encoding. Which tells the browser which character set of letters to use. The A-Z alphabet, Hebrew characters, Japanese, Cryllic, or any other set. This is particularly important when you’re creating pages likely to be viewed by a diverse international audiences.

A good example of a basic character set:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">

META Language declaration:

This META tag declares the language used in the particular web page. Online translation tools use them to translate the page content. This is an important part of attracting an international audience and/or international customers. Language declaration helps with other tasks too:

• accessibility
• page rendering
• font selection
• and more.

A simple example of a page written in US English:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en">

META Description tag:

Many search engines use the META description tag in their search results. A good meta description tag can help improve your click through rate. META descriptions should be complete sentences that accuratly describe your web page. The content of the META description should reinforce the keywords in the page title, targeting alternate versions for the best results.

tip: have different specific META descriptions for each page.

A basic example for a shoe website:
<meta name="description" content="Shoes4less.com - Do you know where to find the best deals on shoes? We do. Look no further just check out our extensive catalog of womens, mens, and childrens shoes." />

META keyword tag:

Are the least important. It is not used by most search engines since it is highly susceptible to spam and users never see it. You should consist of a couple of the main keywords used to describe that page.

Example of META keyword tag for the same shoe store:

<meta name=”keywords” content=”shoes, saddles, high heels, mens shoes, womens shoes, childrens shoes, best deals” />