I prepared this material for beginners in SEO, as well as for site owners who do not know how to fill in meta tags correctly. Consider what is currently relevant and what is no longer used by the search engine when ranking the site.

Let's start by defining what are meta tags?

Meta tags are (X) HTML tags designed to provide structured metadata about a web page. Typically indicated in the tag header (X) HTML document. Meta tags are not displayed on the page and have no visible content. They contain additional information for search robots, various software.

In SEO, when we hear something like “You need to register meta tags on the page”, the Description and Keywords meta tags immediately pop up in your head, and, of course, Title. What's SEO without this tag? I'll start right away with them.

Title tag

It is also called the Title meta tag, although, from a technical point of view, it is not. A very important tag that affects ranking is the title of the page and is often used by search robots when forming the title of a snippet. Therefore, in addition to the fact that you need to add the main keywords to the Title, it is important to monitor its attractiveness. It should encourage users to go to the site.

Title must:

1. Display the essence of the page.
2. Close to the beginning, contain a direct occurrence of the most competitive query.
3. Be a readable sentence with keyword entry.
4. Differ from the page title

   .

5. Do not contain spam.
6. Be unique for every page.
7. The approximate length is about 70 - 130 characters.

For landing pages, categories, sections, I recommend filling in the Description manually.

You can automatically fill in the Description, for example, for product cards. To do this, use templates of the form:

Description: In our online store + “store name” + affordable prices from + “price” + to + “product card name” + delivery to + “city”.

Description: “Product card name” + at an affordable price + “price” + from the online store + “store name” + with delivery + “city”.

How not to do:

1. Don't make your Descriptions too short - short meta descriptions are visible in the HTML Optimization section in Google Search Console.
2. Track and correct duplicate Descriptions there (they must be unique).

1. Don't write inconsistent phrases - the meta tag must be readable. Don't use enumerations.

Meta Keywords

This meta tag does not affect the ranking, but since Yandex writes that meta keywords can be taken into account, I recommend filling it in by adding 3-5 phrases that are relevant to the content, separated by commas.

Expires meta tag- also used to control caching. The date is set in the meta tag. When it passes, the browser should use the repeated network request, not the existing page cache. The date is in RFC850 format.

Usage example:

Content-language meta tag- indicates the language of the document.

Usage example:

In HTML5, specifying the language is simplified:

I tried to list, as it seemed to me, the most interesting meta tags. If you are interested in other meta, I recommend that you familiarize yourself with the materials: Meta tags that are supported by Google and Using HTML elements Yandex.

Let's sum up

There are a lot of meta tags, but, as an optimizer, most often you have to use the Title tag, meta description, meta keywords in SEO. If you are a beginner SEO or a site owner, I also recommend that you familiarize yourself with the webinar “Rules for the formation of Title and Description” of our SEO-TeamLead Evgeny Aralov:

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Optimization of the Title and Description meta tags has two goals: to promote the page for the given keywords, and also to improve the site snippet in search engines. Therefore, special attention must be paid to optimizing these tags.

Watch the video on optimizing the meta Title tag

Meta Title

Yandex shows only 50 characters in its search results, and Google 60-70 characters. At the same time, search engines independently choose which part of the page name to show and which part to crop. In this article, we will take a closer look at the nuances of creating a Title page in a section.

Let's consider an example of one of the pages of our test online store.

The Title tag in this case is about 90 characters, which means that it needs to be shortened. At the same time, do not forget about the very uniqueness of the title: it should be as unique as possible both for your site and for the Internet as a whole. And, of course, search queries in the title should be written harmoniously. We will optimize this page for the main query "evening dresses" and several others from the selected group:

We enter the main request at the very beginning of our title: this has a positive effect on. Then we study the remaining group of keywords: select unique ones from them, and then compose an understandable and attractive title from the resulting list (further part). Ultimately, it will look like this: "Evening dresses in Moscow to buy inexpensively." As you can see, the sentence is one, but it includes words from all searches for the evening dresses group, as well as the main query, which is very important.

Of course, you have to pay attention to the meaningfulness of the phrase. The combination of all words from must be adequately read. In our tutorial example, we skipped this step.

Do not include various titles, phone numbers, addresses, and so on in the Title tag. You only have 50-70 characters and you need to create a clickable headline and place all the keywords you need in it.

If we return to the search, we will just notice the previously selected words from the group of key queries from competitors:

All words that are part of the key queries of the three clusters must be included in the description text. In this case, we use the main query at the very beginning of the text (as well as in creating the title).

Since the number of characters for writing is very limited, try to use only keywords and what can grab the user's attention. Both points are equally important: the first affects SEO results, the second leads visitors to the site.

The part of the description that contains words from the search query groups is highlighted in red. The rest of the words describe the competitive advantages and, in general, the attractiveness of the offer.

Since the search engine can ignore the information from this meta tag, we need to add our description to the text of the page itself. Add it to the very beginning of your content, but in a way that blends in harmoniously with the rest of it.

Once your page is indexed by search engines, check the description snippet. If it hits well, then everything is in order. Otherwise, just change the text itself from the admin panel, which the search engine decided to use as a description for the selected page.

Check and correct them regularly: the description, along with the page title, has the greatest impact on the click-through rate of your site in search.

(2)

Keywords Is a meta tag designed to create a list of keywords and phrases that correspond to the content of the promoted web page and are contained in the text itself. Previously, the keywords tag influenced the optimization of the site, and its rise to the TOP of search engine results for certain user queries. They were abused by webmasters, so search engines stopped taking this tag into account.

Keywords is located in the HTML document of the site inside the head tag

The keywords present in the content of the document and spelled out in the keywords tag help search robots to quickly find indexed pages that match the user's request. Using keywords, the search engine quickly determines the topic of the page and its relevance to certain queries.

Without a doubt, the role of writing the required number of keywords in the content of a website is very important. At the same time, it is important to make the text so that it is readable for a "live" audience, and not just stuff it with keywords for bots. But it was not always so.

Why have keywords lost their relevance in SEO?

In the past, filling in the keywords meta tag was even more important than writing really good informative content. Search engines often gave out in the top positions sites with low-quality texts, chock-full of keywords. Only thanks to meta keywords they could understand how the page is moving and what text it contains.

Webmasters began to abuse, or more specifically, to spam with keywords in keywords, and only due to them they made their way to the first pages of search results, neglecting the quality of content that users need. But over time, search engines have fixed this problem by changing their ranking algorithms and dropping the tag. This was officially announced by Google, Bing.

Low-quality and, at times, meaningless content, deliberately oversaturated with keywords, is today regarded as gray optimization (on our website you can learn more about various methods of website promotion). For this reason, the site can lose positions and even fly out of indexing.

How to fill in the keywords meta tag correctly?

Today, keywords and phrases contained in the text of a page do not have to be duplicated in keywords, as it was before. This method has become irrelevant because search engines have many other modern tools for indexing and ranking pages.

However, no one forbids filling in the tag - it is still supported by some popular engines.

Important! Yandex openly declares its attitude to the tag with keywords: “It can be taken into account when determining the relevance of the page search queries».

Search engine algorithms can change at any time, and the correct spelling of the keys will certainly not make your site worse:

1. Don't overspam... Limit the number of keywords to 3-4 main keywords.
2. Watch out for punctuation marks... Keywords in the keywords tag must be written separated by commas (after a space), or you can write all words separated by a space.
3. Make keywords relevant and unique... They must be written in such a way that they match the content of the web page. Also, avoid repeating keywords - it must be unique for each document.
4. Do not fill in keywords for service web pages containing information about contacts and user comments.

Conclusion

The role of keywords and phrases, as well as the density of their writing in the text of the document, is very great. But due to changes in search algorithms, it is no longer necessary to register them in the keywords meta-tag. Nevertheless, filling this tag with keys will not be superfluous for Yandex. This factor is not so significant, but if possible, it is better to prescribe.

There is a lot of talk around the SEO industry about: is it necessary to specify Meta-tag keywords? Today we will talk about this

What is Meta Keywords tag?

The keywords meta tag is a tag that contains a list of keywords that match the content of a page on your site. There are also the equally well-known Title and Description tags.

History of keywords

This tag appeared in 1995. It was created to simplify the work of search engines when indexing a large number of pages. The bottom line was that the webmaster wrote in the meta tag keywords that reflect the topic of the page. The search robot processed the content of keywords along with the rest of the content. When assessing the relevance of a site, pages in which the requested keyword was found received higher positions in the search results.
After a while, SEOs started using this tag for spam. And in 1998 to the present day, Google stopped taking into account the site's meta keywords for ranking its pages, and other search engines have limited its importance.

What does the keywords tag consist of?

The meta tag is placed in the section ... It has the following attributes name - which indicates the type of keywords and the attribute content, which contains just the keywords.
This is how the syntax of the html meta keywords tag looks like

How not to write meta keywords

Write no more than 20 words. Excessive listing of keywords (overspam) will not be perceived by the search engine. Focus on 200 characters, no more.
Do not repeat the same words more than 2 times. Repeated listing of a keyword (phrase) is always negatively perceived in SEO analysis of a site and determining whether the page matches search queries.

How to fill in the Keywords tag correctly?

Use more declensions. If you really want to use a keyword, like meta keywords, several times - use the keyword (phrase) in various declensions and numbers;
Connected words and adjectives. In addition to the main keywords in meta keywords, write similar keywords. For example, as in the example below.

It will also be useful to study other tags used in internal site optimization.
English-speaking requests. If your site can use English-language keywords, you should add them to the meta tag. For example, brands of well-known smartphones: Apple, Xiaomi, Nokia, etc.

Use spaces or commas in Meta Keywords?

There are two ways to write keywords:

• Spelling keywords in meta keywords separated by a space;
• Spelling keywords separated by commas.

What is the difference for search engines?
We use commas to separate key phrases... Accordingly, the search robot understands exactly which word forms we want to use.

Example 1:
“Children's clothing, children's toys, online children's goods store”.
Using a space, the search robot independently creates various word forms.

Example 2:
"Children's clothing toys online store baby products".

Examples of filling meta keywords on large sites

A real example of filling a tag with commas... The well-known site Svyaznoy.ru did not really bother with key tags and wrote only keywords + adjectives.

An example of filling a tag with spaces. The Kinopoisk website has described in more detail (159 characters).

Keywords for Wordpress and Joomla

CMS Wordpress and Joomla using plugins allows you to add keywords tag directly in the admin panel.
Most popular WordPress plugins:

• All in SEO
• Yoast SEO

The most popular components for Yoomla:

• SEO Boss

Meta tag keywords - what does it mean for Yandex?

Quote:“The Meta Keywords tag can be taken into account when determining whether a page matches search queries..”

Based on this quote, Yandex says that the tag “can” be taken into account in the ranking of the site, says that it does not play a key role. Let me remind you that Yandex has over 100 ranking factors.
Also search engines Mail.ru, Bing give a minimum value to the keywords tag.

Does Google still take meta keywords into account?

Every year since 1998, the influence of the tag has been decreasing. This article, written in 2009, finally put an end to meta keywords.

In 2017, work on other elements of the pages is relevant. I am giving you a selection of such articles:

Conclusion

Many people indicate meta keywords for reassurance, but it's up to you to write it or not.
Knowing how and where to register the keywords tag will be useful for novice SEO specialists.
On my own I will add: in Lately the impact of this tag is minimal compared to the ranking factors that have emerged over the past 5-7 years.

Besides this tag, there are even more important tags such as: and.
Leave comments who think it is worth specifying keywords.

In this section I will tell you what is meta tags in HTML and how to use them when creating a website.

If you haven't forgotten, you should know that meta tags should be in the header of the html page in tags and... They are not displayed on the page, except for the title. Meta title tags exist a large number of, but I will write only about the most important ones:

• title - the text in this tag is visible in the title of the browser window. It is also called the title of the html page;
• meta - a meta tag that contains attributes with different parameters that help servers and search engines.

Let's analyze the first very important tag ... No site can exist normally without it. It must be applied absolutely on all pages of your site. In addition to the fact that its text is displayed in the header of the browser, it will also be displayed in search results. Sample HTML code:

Content of your site.

Try to insert keywords in the title (title), they will help you to promote your site, because the page will be better perceived by the search engine. Truthfully, before inserting them into the title, you need to give you a little understanding of what keywords are in general.

Keywords are words that describe the content of an html page more than any other, and are more relevant to it (keywords). They can be either just single words or phrases. By seeing these words on a page, the search engine determines how relevant this page is in relation to the given words. When creating an html page, try to define in advance the main keywords for it, and use them in the title (title), as well as in the values ​​of the meta tag attributes. I will write about this further.

Meta tag ( ) serves to define the service data about the html page. Meta tag attributes can be divided into two types: HTTP-EQUIV (HTTP equivalents) and NAME. Although there are a large number of these attributes, I will write only the basic ones that you need to create a site. I'll start with HTTP-EQUIV.

content-type - the type of the document and its encoding. Serves for the correct display of characters in the browser window. HTML code:

content-language - specifying the language of the document. The value of this attribute is used by both search robots and web servers. HTML code:

refresh - time (in seconds) after which the page will be refreshed or switched to another html page or site. HTML code to refresh the page after 20 seconds:

If you want the visitor to go to, for example, the page https: // site in 10 seconds, write like this:

description - description of your html page. Many people think that this meta tag is useless and unnecessary, and also does not affect the ranking of the page in search engines. But I'm old school and I think it still works great. In it, I also advise you to write keywords. By the way, sometimes the content of this particular meta tag is displayed as a result of the output under the title. Here's an example of HTML code:

keywords - keywords of the document. I think everything is clear here - you write here all the keywords separated by commas that are associated with this page. HTML code:

I have listed the basic HTML meta tags a beginner needs to create their website. You can of course use other sources to find out other meta tags, it's up to you, but these I recommend to use always, without exception. To pinpoint another example of HTML code:

Use other meta tags as needed, do not place unnecessary ones, even for the sake of experiment, until you know everything about them. Meta tags will help users and search engines to better perceive your site, make it even more interesting and better. They will help users find your site on Yandex and Google, help its optimization and promotion.

Date of publication: May 15, 2012