META tags are like icing on a cake — Sure they make the site better, but if you use them wisely, they can make your site amazing. I’m talking about the little details that make them oh-so-much better and far more powerful. Do you know what they are? And more importantly, have you done some of the don’ts?
META Tag Tips
DO ensure your site has META title, description, and keyword tags. It’s generally accepted that Google hasn’t used the keyword tag for years, but recent observations suggest they may be using them again. Other search engines, however, do use them, as well as various social networks.
DO make them interesting and clickable. Because they’re very likely to be used as the label for the page’s listing in the search results, they have to sell the page and convince people to click through.
DO include the main keyword for the page and try to place it near the beginning. It works, but it works for searchers too. They’re able to better identify your page as something that matches their query because it’s at the front (they skim and only generally read the first 2-4 words) and bolded.
DO include singulars, plurals, misspelled words, and synonyms in your tags and content. If you don’t, the search engines won’t see it as being relevant. However, don’t overstuff the content or the tags with keywords.
DO take time to test your tags. This is quick, easy, and painless to do. You’ll also be able to use the things you use during this step for creating other pages.
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META Tag Mistakes
DON’T load your title and description up with general keyword terms. This make the site look spammy, and uninteresting at the very least. However, it’s important to remember that title tags are often used by social networking sites and browsers for bookmarking and tab identification. If your title tag only contains keywords, no one will be able to tell your site apart from your competitors if more than one is bookmarked or opened at the same time. The most helpful is often a company name at the end of the title tag.
DON’T make all your tags the same. Yes, it does make a difference!
DON’T forget about the tags for your images and other media. These will help your site’s SEO, but they will also be helpful to users who have images and such turned off while browsing.
DON’T limit yourself to thinking META tags only include the title, description, and keywords. Tags can actually have a variety of functions and purposes. That being said, be very careful when using tags you’re not familiar with. (I’ve heard several SEOs tell me of clients who complained they couldn’t get listed in the search engines only to discover each page had ‘noindex’ and ‘expires’ tags.) They might also act as a red flag for crawlers, which could then consider your site as a possible spam site. (Not saying it’s a definitive sign of spam sites, but it could put you at a slightly higher risk or lower the value of your own site if done incorrectly.) On a side note, don’t bloat the code full of useless tags and elements.
DON’T mistake tags for rules or laws. Tags strongly suggest to crawlers what they should be doing with a particular piece of content, but they’re by no means required to take that suggestion. Crawlers frequently ignore tags. A good example is the infamous ‘revisit’ tag.
3 Comments on "META Tag Dos and Don'ts"
Hi i m new to SEO
i m kinda not sure about the keyword meta tags 
since i m using wordpress so each meta tag will mean a different page and following the recent panda update it wont be a gud idea to index tag pages as it can create duplicat econtent isssues……so i have noindexed the tags but dofollowed them
PS – using too many tags will mean leaking ur pr unecessary to tag pages.we wna rank for our post i think and not tag
earlier i used too many of them but nowadays i m not using more than 4 
I strongly suggest you think your strategy through and do some reading before you start playing around with PR sculpting. Also, WordPress tags and META tags are two very, very different beasts. Playing around with indexing can do more harm than good, if you’re not completely sure about what you’re doing.
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