Meta tags overdose won't rank your site better. 2 is ok, 3 are multitude
It is quite a basic issue but it rears it's ugly head from time to time. Someone asked at our OME presentation so let me explain it as clear as possible.
The first publicly available description of HTML was a document called 'HTML Tags' in late 1991, 18 years later the amount of meta tags has grown substantially. It appears anyone can create new meta types on the fly.
<meta name="caprice" content="I would eat a delicious paella right now"> :)
From a SEO perspective really few of them are useful and the rest just a waste of precious lines before some relevant juicy content.
Do you really think Google bot will revisit your site every 3 days because you asked for it in a meta tag? <meta name="revisit-after" content="3 days" />
Instead saying: hey G.Bot! do not display DMOZ description for my site in your SERPS. <meta name="googlebot" content="noodp" /> Simply write and provide a nice one, it will do the trick. This is what exactly <meta name="description" content="..." /> is for.
<meta name="robots" content="index" /> hilarious, should I explain why?
<meta name="search engines" content="google.com, yahoo.com, ..." />
who the hell invented it? I've only seen that once by the way.
Forget about Dublin Core meta tags as dc.title, dc.creator, dc.subject and so.
People wondering if these ones can improve your rankings, can you believe it?
<meta http-equiv="pics-label" content='(pics-1.1 "http://www.classify.org/safesurf/" l r (ss~~000 1))'>
<meta http-equiv="pics-label" content='(pics-1.1 "http://www.rsac.org/ratingsv01.html" l r (n 0 s 0 v 0 l 0))'>
The finest SEO header
Ok, what I need inside my <head> tag? No more than this:
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
<title>...</title>
<meta name="description" content="..."/>
<link href="/css/all.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="all"/>
<script src="/cfg/all-javascript-in-once.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
</head>
First charset declaration ('iso-8859-1, 'utf-8' or the one required) and right after <title> tag, works better if your title text has special chars and of course Meta description.
You are right, <title> is not a meta tag but, toghether with description, are the pilars of basic content optimization as stats demostrates if we have unique title and meta description in every page.
Then CSS, Javascript enter stage and anything more. Well, few optional ones but no metas, of course:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="/rss/" />
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" />
Language declaration
Search engines are very good detecting the language of content but a nice habit is follow W3C recommendations, yes SEO is about standars. Page language can be declare at root element <html> like this.
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
No need to add an extra meta tag like
<meta http-equiv="content-language" content="en">
What about meta keywords?
Only supported by few crawlers, If you are really bored and a lot of time to waste after finishing all SEO duties go ahead otherwise forget it.
<meta name="keywords" content="..."/>
And Robots metas?
'noindex', 'nofollow', and 'none' (noindex+nofollow) only when needed and having good reasons to use them. Alternatives: rel="nofollow" at links and robots.txt
<meta name="robots" content="..."/>
Canonical, new kid in town
It is not a meta tag itself although it is placed at <head> section.
<link rel="canonical" href="http://example.com/page.html"/>
Here you can learn the use canonical link tag and here I dedicate a complete post to it because there are a lot of better things to do dealing with the so-called duplicated content than inseminate your site with canonicals.
A good example of a bad meta tags usage
This is a perfect example of a meta tags nightmare, take a look at the big picture first.
What is wrong here?
- Languages mixing, yes they try to put some order using lang="es" in tags but no way
- Tons of useless tags, now you know which ones I mean
- Pragmas? Caches? Let technology do it, don't worry about
- 'Verify-vi' Web aster tools verification tag. Do it uploading the indicated html and save a line of code
- 'MSSmartTagsPreventParsing' wow! ancient mayan language?
- Kilometric descriptions, keyword stuffing
Some other pearls along the rest of the page deserving a complete case study but enough for today.
