How the keywords meta tag works. Everything you need to know about Title, Description, Keywords meta tags (length, optimization, examples)

The keywords meta tag is used on a page to list keywords (key words) that describe its content. According to the theory, when search robots come to the site, they study this list and use it for indexing and ranking. But this is just a theory. In practice, no one can say for sure how the Keywords tag is used by search engines and whether it is used at all, because its role has changed significantly in recent years.

How the Keywords tag is written

As for html, the meta name keywords content is written in the tag. After the content attribute comes the immediate list:

In this case, there are certain filling rules that should be followed. They have been known for a long time, but it is difficult to judge the effectiveness in modern conditions:

quantity limit. The more words you include in the list, the worse. The optimal number has always been considered to be about 20 pieces. If you exceed it, search robots are unlikely to take it positively;

repetitions. In addition to the total number, repetitions should be controlled. If the same word is constantly listed, you can expect a negative reaction from search engines. Experts advise limiting yourself to three repetitions;

declination. Often you still have to use one phrase, because it is the main one. If there is no other way out, you should use it in different word forms and decline words;

typos. Not all search engine users can boast of perfect literacy. Input errors are common. Those who decide to fill in the Keywords meta tag need to anticipate this;

English language. English words will help to diversify the list, if they are relevant and correspond to the subject of the page.

Spelling Features

Some features of filling Keywords cause controversy among optimizers. One of the questions that many people face is spelling. How to separate key phrases from each other and is it necessary to do this? There are two main points of view here:

with commas. Each word (separate phrase) is followed by a comma and then a space. Then the next key is written and so on. If you follow these rules when compiling meta name keywords content, then the robot clearly understands which word forms need to be perceived and taken into account. You can use data from the semantic core that matches the content of the page;

without commas. All words and phrases are written one after another without any visible distinctions - only spaces. The entire list merges into a large cluster. According to the supporters of this method, the search robot, not finding commas, itself composes various variants of word forms.

There are other less popular theories, such as the lack of spaces after commas. In any case, there is no reliable data on the relevance of any of the options.

How Search Engines Consider Keywords

Initially, the Keywords tag played an important role in shaping the overall picture of what will be discussed on the site. Search engines actively studied it and corrected the issue. This feature was used by SEO-optimizers, getting good results in terms of promotion. However, over time, the ranking system has become more complicated, and the attitude towards the meta tag has changed. Consider how specific search engines take into account Keywords.

Yandex. The search engine is ambivalent about meta name keywords content. It is impossible to say with certainty whether Yandex refused the tag or not. Official statements and interviews with developers are usually vague and do not carry specific information. For example, here is the information contained on Yandex.Webmaster.

In other words, it either counts or it doesn't. Many experts say that the Yandex search robot cannot completely ignore correctly compiled code. At the same time, no one gives guarantees that the situation will not change in the near future. Attitude to Keywords can change at any time. Therefore, from the point of view of Yandex, it is better to prescribe key phrases - it will take a little time, but there is a possibility of benefit in the future.

Google

Google experts are much more specific about the Keywords tag.

"Google does not use the Keywords meta tag when generating web rankings." However, some are skeptical about such claims. As mentioned above, everything can change at any time. No one guarantees that the Google search engine has abandoned the meta tag forever.

Other search engines and CMS

If we talk about less popular search engines like Bing, Yahoo, Rambler, Mail.ru and others, then there is also a minimum of information. But given that most of them use the Yandex and Google algorithms, we can talk about a similar attitude towards meta name keywords content. At the same time, such well-known CMS as WordPress and Joomla still support the tag.

Search engine developers claim that Keywords will not affect search promotion in any way, or its value will be almost imperceptible. But SEO specialists are advised to count on the variability of the system. Rejecting the tag now can lead to the fact that in the future you will have to prescribe keywords for hundreds and thousands of pages.

Meta tags, meta tags, meta tags(rarely still SEO tags) - all this is the same concept in promoting sites in search engines. In a nutshell, these are special HTML (or XMTL) tags (elements) that are included in the site page code and are not visible to the user visually on the page. These are auxiliary elements for promotion, which are specially introduced into the code to transmit information about the site to browsers and search engines.

Proper filling of meta tags on the site is very important for the SEO promotion of any site. When developing a site, meta tags must be taken into account immediately: so that they are displayed on each page in the code, filled everywhere, and also so that it is possible to edit meta tags on each page at any time. The correct filling of meta tags especially contributes to the promotion of low-frequency queries. One of the main rules for filling in SEO tags is their uniqueness on the site: there should be no duplication of meta tag values on any page of the site. The absence of the main meta tags on the page negatively affects the promotion.

Important!

These tags are not required elements when creating the site page code and do not affect its performance. The presence of meta tags on the page is an important criterion for SEO website promotion.

Main page meta tags and where they should be placed

Meta tags that exist (although there are a few more of them) and which we will talk about in this article:

title (title, title) – page title (which is sent to the browser);
description (description) - description of the page;
keywords (keywords) - keywords;
robots (robots) - page indexing rules for robots.

Where are these tags usually placed in the page code? Inside the container at the very beginning of the page code. They may have several different purposes. Meta tags must be placed on all pages of the site and must be filled out correctly and correctly.

How to add meta tags to a website

Meta tags should be added to templates by site programmers/developers. But SEO specialists should already prescribe meta values. Meta tags should be added to templates by site programmers/developers. And it is more convenient to prescribe meta values directly to the SEO specialist - for this, functionality should be provided in the site administration system. You can fill in the tag values manually for each page separately, or using automatic rules for the site.

How to check if a site has meta tags

You can check if the page has meta tags by opening the page code. You can do this in several ways:

Meta title tag (title, page title)

Concept and syntax

The title tag is one of the most important when optimizing. Title is the title of the page, its title. Therefore, it should be present on all pages of the site. Pages without titles on the site look like this in the snippet:

That is, the url of the page itself is given in the header (the url is the address of the page).

A snippet is a small block of text that describes a website page in search results. Thanks to the snippet, the user can get an idea of the site without visiting it.

Accordingly, the title must be present on all pages of the site. It contributes to better optimization for queries in search results.

The title is located in the tag . Briefly it looks like this:

...
Page Title
...

There are generally accepted rules for filling the title. But to call these rules "rules" can only be conditional. Consider the main points that you should first of all pay attention to when compiling a meta title:

title length;
title content;
use of key queries in the title;
use of stop words in the title;
use of punctuation marks.

12 Basic Heading Rules Title

In the search results, we see the title here:

Often, it is this heading that users decide whether to go to the site or not. That's why the content of the title pages is very important: it must be on topic, meaningful and informative in order to attract attention.

How to fill in the title correctly:

You need to understand that there are always exceptions to the rules: sometimes pages where there are elements about which we say “no”, “refrain” get into the top, for example:

Description meta tag (description, page description)

Concept and syntax

Description is also an important parameter when promoting sites. Dispersion is a logical extension of the page title. If in the title we briefly say what the page is about, then in the description we do it in more detail. But you don’t need to make the description look very similar to the title, don’t include phrases from the title in it. It should be an independent text that is not so focused on key queries as it should be attractive to the user, since often the description can be given in a snippet in the search results here:

When forming a snippet, search engines consider description as a text block equally with other text fragments of the page.

7 Basic Rules for Writing Description Pages

What we look at first of all in the description:

description length,
the uniqueness of the description,
content.

There are some conditional SEO rules for the correct compilation of the description:

Little tricks: recently it has become popular to use special characters and emoji in descriptions (emoji are “smilies”, “graphic elements”). Similarly, emoji can be used in titles. This use presumably affects search click through rates by making the site snippet more attractive (but there is no evidence). But there is no need to “borscht” with such use, i.e. emoji should not be inserted every two words. How it might look:

But this is just our subjective opinion.

Advice! Emoji cannot be placed as the very first and/or the very last element of titles and descriptions, as search engines ignore them and do not give them to the snippet.

If there are no descriptions anywhere on your site, or they are partially, but not on all pages, or there are duplicate descriptions, we strongly advise you to correct this situation as soon as possible. Description must be present on all pages of the site and be unique throughout the site.

Lyrics about keywords (keywords, keywords)

Separately, let's say about keywords, but not much: today this meta tag does not bring any benefit to the site.

A bit of history: What is it? This tag once contained a list of basic queries (keywords) that matched the content of the page. They could be listed separated by commas, or without punctuation marks, separated by spaces. Previously, search engines took into account these words when indexing.

The keywords meta tag was placed similarly inside the tag . Simplified, it looked like this:

...

...

4 rules that were taken into account in Keywords

Use no more than 20 words. Placing too many words could have a negative impact on the perception of search engines.
No more than 3 repetitions one keyword: here the principle is similar - no need to cause negativity on the part of search engines due to overspam.
Insert misspelled words: Typos are normal for the user. Sometimes misspelled words could be more popular than the main query.
Using English Queries: if the theme of the site (page) allows it.

The question has always arisen, how to write keywords correctly: through a space or through a comma? It has been argued that both options are correct. Comma-separated queries were the more popular use case. How it might have looked:

An example of keywords without commas. Here again there are two options:

List of requests, similar with commas, but without them:
Or the use of words only once without commas:

If the keywords meta tag was filled in well, this had a positive effect on the relevance of the page, which helped in promotion.

But once again, we note that today this tag is no longer taken into account at all, or its value is reduced to a minimum.

Here is all the information that should be enough to understand what meta keywords are and how they were used.

And for a snack: Robots meta tag

The robots tag is also inside the container … anywhere. Brief syntax:

...

...

This meta tag affects page indexing.

Site indexing- this is the process of searching, collecting, processing and adding information about the site to the database of search engines, i.e. search robots come to your site and take its pages into the database, which they can then give to the search results.

With the help of the robots tag, we tell search robots whether to index the page or not, who to index and who not, i.e. affect the indexing of the site. The content attribute must consist of one or more directives (if there are several, separate them with commas).

The directives themselves:

all - it is allowed to index the text and links on the current page;
none - it is forbidden to index the text and follow the links on the page;
index - equal to all, i.e. indexing is allowed;
follow - same as all;
noindex - forbidden to index the text of the page;
nofollow - it is forbidden to follow links on the page;
noimageindex - disables indexing of images on the current page.
noarchive - prohibits displaying "Saved copy" links in search results;
nosnippet - prohibits the snippet from being displayed in the search results.

Most often, the robots tag looks like this:

- it is allowed to index the page;
- not allowed to index the page.

It is advisable to use this tag on all pages of the site with permission to be indexed, except for those pages that you want to disable. In addition, you can specify different parameters for different search engines, for example, allow Yandex to index, and prohibit Google. You can do this by specifying a specific robot: - ban for Yandex, - Google ban.

You need to fill in such tags carefully so that there are no errors in the syntax, or repetitions inside the tag, or tags that are mutually opposite to each other (for example, the code allows and prohibits indexing). In this case robots tags can be ignored by robots.

Briefly about other meta tags

content-type- shows data about the document type and its encoding. May affect the correct display in browsers. Example .

content-language- gives information about the used language of the content (content). .

Refresh- this tag allows you to set the page refresh time when loading or redirecting the user to another section. Useful in case of site update: instead of a 404 error page or a long loading time, it redirects the user to a new section: .

Meta Author And Copyright- indicates the authorship of the graphic and text content of the page: (page author) (copyright ownership), (address of the author/owner).

Typical mistakes when compiling meta tags

duplication the same value of meta tags for several pages, and sometimes on all pages of the site.
Adding to the meta identical tails(pieces), these can be the names of the site / company, or some auxiliary constructions of the same type, such as “on the site of the salon ...”.
Too much long values titles and descriptions, or vice versa, are too short.
empty value meta tags.
Spamming keywords.
Several of the same tags on one page (for example, two titles).

Conclusion

Here is some basic information on site meta tags that may be useful to you in promotion. Follow some or all of the rules and you'll be more successful in search rankings. Good luck!

Hello, dear readers of the blog site. Today I want to go a little more in detail than I did in the article about website promotion, to focus on the title, description and keywords meta tags, which have been factors influencing the success of web projects promotion for more than fifteen years.

But are they really that useful for your site? Or maybe they are the reasons for the stagnation or very sluggish movement forward of your Internet project? This is the question I will try to answer in this article.

When writing this material, I took into account not only my own experience, but also the experience of specialists who are considered authoritative in this field (for the most part, they were included in my list). Enter you again in .

Also, on many questions and terms encountered, I will refer you to more detailed materials, so as not to waste your and my time. Well, now let's quickly start resolving the intrigue - why title can be dangerous?

Are title, description, and keywords meta tags important for SEO?

So, in order to understand the course of my thoughts and not get lost, you need to start over, namely from the distant 90s, when the “great and terrible” meta tags (read about) were for the search engines available at that time. At that time, the idea that came to mind to Larry Page (one of) had not yet been implemented.

This means that the main factor by which the search engine solved the problem of relevance (the correspondence of the document to the question that the user asked the search engine) was the analysis of the text for the content of the words from the user's query. Not only the density (frequency of use) of keywords in the article was taken into account, but also the contents of the meta tags keywords, description and especially the title.

It is from those very distant times that there is a belief that these same meta tags are the key to success in promoting your article. But this is far from being the case, and even more than that - everything has turned upside down. They may be the cause, or they will simply put spokes in the wheels when trying to promote it. Why is this happening? Let's try to figure it out.

All this disgrace in the code can look something like this:

... They hinder progress ...

Actually, you will need to know the syntax for compiling a description, title and keywords mainly only for pro forma (well, or if you are creating a static site on Html files).

If you create a project on (site engine), then you will be given the opportunity to simply fill in the form fields, after which this content will be inserted into the title, description or keywords in the web page code. But this is not the point, because we are not talking about details (about them a little later in the text), but about global things - why these innocent things can be a deadly factor for website promotion.

So, initially these meta tags were supposed to serve a good purpose - make life easier for search engines to identify the most relevant search query pages. As the saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. If for some time there was an idyll, then only until there was competition for the Top of the issue (traffic comes mainly only from the first page of the search engine results for any), and the very presence of the resource in the Top did not directly affect the benefits received its owner.

The widespread spamming of description and keywords meta tags began, and the title also got it. When ranking, search engines could no longer focus on such easily cheated factors, and gradually the meaning of the words contained in the description and keywords, was completely leveled(perhaps not to zero, but very close to it).

For some reason, search engines did not dare to act so harshly with the title. The words contained within this wonder tag are still of paramount importance in ranking, but relatively recently even this postulate of promotion (which lasted about fifteen years) has become less unshakable.

Description and keywords - meta tags that do not affect ranking

So, let's do a subtotal. Keywords can be thrown in the trash? Well... Probably not. Personally, I try (if I don’t forget) to prescribe keys in it, but only those that are most often found in the article. The fact is that they almost completely ceased to influence the promotion in a positive way. But keywords are still capable of shitting all the raspberries. Search engines have not yet canceled the punishment for spam in meta tags.

What's the description? Everything is not clear here. Why? Again, spamming with keys in it can negatively affect promotion. Why is it needed then, if the keywords contained in it not taken into account when ranking, but can do harm at the same time?

The fact is that the contents of the description by the Google search engine can quite often be used as, especially at first. So, for example, my recent article about in the issuance of Google for the query "translit" looks like this:

This is not all the text from the description, because Google and Yandex take into account only a certain number of characters (you can calculate it yourself, but usually they are guided by 150 characters, including spaces):

I said that the snippet is formed in this way most often by Google, but Yandex sometimes also does not neglect this possibility. All for the same request “transliteration”, the snippet in its issuance, again, so far consists of the words contained in the description of this web page:

As you can see, in the resulting snippet of both search engines, the keywords of the query (which I also used when compiling the description) were highlighted in bold, which somewhat increases the chances of going to my site, because attracts more attention to the ad.

This is the main purpose of the description for site promotion - the snippet created by the search engine based on it should attract the attention of users and encourage them to choose your resource for the transition.

Whether or not the description you specified will eventually be used as a snippet is another question. Your business is to prescribe it with the obligatory mention of keywords, as well as with intriguing and exploiting curiosity content users (keeping within 150 letters).

However, this meta tag is just one of many ways to tell search engines what text they should use as a snippet. Moreover, this method is not the most reliable and does not give any guarantees, but it is simple and straightforward - you just need to get used to always filling in the description fields before publishing an article.

It is clear that if you are in the Top for the query "plastic windows", then you will use the whole arsenal of ways to influence the snippet (for example, this one), because this can result in simply fantastic amounts of profit due to the increased CTR of your ad (combined with title). But I personally am content with only the obligatory filling in description, well, also keywords (to a heap, but now I have already refused the latter, because, well, it is).

Title decides who will be in the Top and who...

What is the main difference between Title and Description? For spamming keywords in all three meta tags, you can seriously pay with subsidence of positions in search engines. This unites them and makes them a rather dangerous tool in inept hands.

But the Title (page title) has one difference. If you do not write the other two meta tags, then nothing terrible will happen by and large, but if you forget to write a title for a web page, then most likely it will will not participate in the search, i.e. will not be added to the index ().

Another thing is that almost all CMS automatically generate a title from the title of your article, and the ability to manually change it is usually provided optionally (for example, using the appropriate extensions). Therefore, only owners should take care of its mandatory prescribing.

But in itself, the presence of a filled header on absolutely all pages of your site does not make the weather. There are a number of nuances that must be observed automatically when compiling texts for titles and which can greatly affect both positively and negatively on.

Moreover, it should be noted that this tag performs two very important roles:

It is precisely from taking into account these two concepts that one should proceed when compiling the optimal text of the title. On this one could end the conversation about him, but not everything is so simple. Let's try to chew all this in detail and pay special attention to those mistakes that can lead to fatal consequences.

Let's start with the influence of the title tag on ranking (from the point of view of the webmaster - on promotion):

As I already mentioned, the main condition for successful promotion should be the presence of headings on all web pages of your site. No title means no search traffic.

The second important condition is that this tag should be used in the web page code only once and only inside the Head container (and not the Body). In general, the CMS (content management system) you use should be responsible for this, but it won’t hurt to check the correctness of its operation. To do this, just look at the source code of any page of your site and make sure that the title tag is included and correctly inserted into this very code.

You can view the source code of a website page by right-clicking in your browser and selecting the context menu item "Source code" (in Opera), or "Page source code" (in Firefox), or "View page code" (in Google Chrome) , or HTML Viewer (IE).

Titles for all pages of your site should be different from each other (be unique). It is quite difficult to achieve this in practice (for example, my main page has pagination and these very numbered subpages cannot boast of unique titles), however, for those pages that you are promoting, this rule must be observed. A large number of pages with the same title tell search engines that this site is similar to the HS.
The order of keywords inside the title tag is also taken into account by search engines (mainly Google), so it is important to place the most frequent keys at the beginning (it will tell you about this), and then in descending order of frequency. Realizing this task in practice is not so easy, because the title of the page must remain readable and, if possible, enticing.

Some CMS (for example, Joomla 1.5) form the default page title from the site name that comes first, and only then add the article title. Following the logic of the previous paragraph, this cannot be done, because you worsen the ranking (promotion) of your resource (you can find links to materials in the article about). Although a well-known SEO specialist refutes this principle with his example:

An exception to this rule can be made for well-known brands, the mere mention of which can be an incentive to click on the ad (for example, ).

Recently, Yandex and Google have become sometimes don't use title as the title of the site in the search results. Most likely this is a response to the fact that this tag does not reflect or does not fully reflect the content of the article. From this we conclude that the words you enter into it must be completely relevant to the text of the web page, otherwise the search engine will distort everything to its taste and color.

Most experts advise limiting title length a certain number of characters (about 70), but personally I don’t always follow this rule, because I can’t make short headlines. In principle, Yandex can select fragments with keywords from this tag of any length, which allows you to optimize the article for a larger number of requests. It will not look like ice, but it is quite acceptable, in my opinion:

True, Google, unfortunately, does not know how to do this, and the user may not see the keywords from his query at all in the ad heading for my blog:

There is one more thing that I personally do not implement when compiling titles for my blog. By default, in many CMS it is formed from the text of the title of the article, which will most often be enclosed in . Because the presence of keywords in H1 is a ranking factor in itself (although not as powerful as title), it makes sense to prescribe the title of the entire page slightly different from the title of the article. I personally do not do this (it breaks), and they live in my H2 tags, and not in H1.
In WordPress, unique titles are usually used to prescribe, but in Joomla, as described in the article about .
In general, it is very important not to overdo it. On the one hand, brevity is the sister of talent, but simply listing the keys in a title can lead to sad consequences (decrease in positions or even a complete departure of the page from the index). On the other hand, in order to reduce its size, it is desirable to use less empty (stop) words (conjunctions, particles, pronouns) in it, which cannot affect the ranking in any way. All in all, need to find the golden mean.

How to write a title that exploits curiosity

A little higher, we examined the technical aspects that primarily affect the successful ranking of your documents (their promotion). But about the second task that Title performs, we have talked so far only very superficially. I'm talking about creating a catchy headline that can greatly increase the frequency of clicks on your ad in Yandex or Google search results (ctr).

It will not be very easy to implement all the tips described below in practice (it doesn’t work for me), but if it works out, then it may end up. The idea is to make the page title (title) not only meet all the requirements described above, but also be able to arouse curiosity among the majority of users who read it.

So, let's look at the basic principles of creating headlines that can evoke one of the most powerful driving forces of knowledge - curiosity. In order to satisfy his interest, the user will be able to read your article from cover to cover, the main thing is to maintain the interest that has arisen throughout the article and not disappoint the user at its end (do not cross the line and do not stoop to).

Most of all, users are curious about such headings (title, including), statements in which challenge established concepts. This will be especially effective for a reader who is familiar with this topic, but your headline breaks his stereotypes and it begins to seem to him that he probably doesn’t know something (he missed something, didn’t take into account, or there is some kind of secret which he does not know).

The desire to understand all this flares up, and this is what you needed. An example, perhaps, can be to some extent the title of this article (a test of the pen, so to speak).

So, in the way described above, you create some confusion (tear) in the reader's head, thereby trying to stimulate him to read your article. But not everything is so simple. Many readers will be on their own minds (people tend to value their knowledge, as a rule, higher than they have a place to be).

They will decide that they already know what your article will be about. You need to write a title so that they understand that you know what they know, but you will talk in the article about what is still unknown to them.

Well, it would be nice if the text of the article corresponded to the title compiled with such difficulty. Each paragraph should maintain intrigue and curiosity by quietly answering the reader's questions.

In general, it is clear that the matter is dark. If you have talent, then using these tips to create a catchy title you will succeed, and if not, then it will not work (like me, for example).

Good luck to you! See you soon on the blog pages site

History of Keywords

The introduction of meta tags dates back to 1995, and initially they helped determine the relevance of a page to a user's search query. At that time, there were few ranking tools at all, so meta tags played an important role.

The optimizers of the first wave took advantage of this and began to add popular queries that were not related to the site's subject, for example, "porn", "download for free", etc., into the keywords. When the trick was discovered by search engines, the data in this field no longer taken into account.

However, site optimization instructions wander from generation to generation, calling for keywords to be written along with the title and description (the latter, by the way, have not been canceled yet).

Official positions of Yandex and Google

The Yandex directory indicates that the Keywords meta tag can be used to determine if a page matches a search query. Unfortunately, Yandex did not say anything more on this topic, so you can regard this vague wording as you like. Today, however, most professional optimizers agree that the tag no longer plays a role.

Google was clearer - back in 2009, representatives of the corporation stated that they did not take into account Keywords.

This is not surprising, given the significant increase in the number of ranking factors over the past decade. If now even the keywords in the texts on the site are fading into the background, then what can we say about meta tags.

They can't help, but they can hurt?

Most site owners and their contractors simply can't leave the Keywords field alone - since it's already there, it needs to be filled in. Just in case.

The main key phrases related to the topic of the page are usually entered into the line. It's best to just enter the most frequent request (only one!), For example, "elite doors in Moscow." But someone is not limited to this and stuffs a huge list of keys into the field.

And if this meta tag is useless for ranking, then it is quite possible for it to start a site under the filter for overspam.

It turns out that in an effort to “do everything right,” you risk nullifying all the optimization work.

So is it worth it to write the keywords meta tag?

No. And again no. Search engines do not take into account the tag, users do not see it, and SEOs spend working time.

The easiest way to dispel your doubts is to look at competitors in the search results. We fill in the frequency query and see if the top ten sites in the search results have keywords. If most of them do not, then there is no point in prescribing them either. Will not help.

The best solution is to tame your perfectionism and focus on the really important tasks in website promotion. For example,

Free and cheaper analogues of Publer

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Everything you need to know about Title, Description, Keywords meta tags (length, optimization, examples)

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