Must Have Meta info?

[Superflys]

Just wondering what meta info is must have these days.

For example"

|   | http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" /> |
|   | name="Subject" content="Invision Technical - Spokane Web Design an Development services" /> |
|   | name="keywords" content="Spokane Website Design, Spokane Web Design, Website designers spokane Washington, Spokane web site Design firm, Web design spokane, spokane web designers, spokane web hosting, spokane web development, spokane web marketing services."/> |
|   | name="description" content="Spokane Website Design by Invision Technical. Quality website designers in Spokane Washington. Call (509) 590-0655 for your Spokane Web Design needs."/> |
|   | property="og:title" content=" Invision Technical | Website Design and Development"/> |
|   | property="og:description" content=" Web Design | Development | Web Hosting | Logo Design | Branding | Custom Software | Search Engine Optimization"/> |
|   | property="og:image" content="http://www.spokanewebsitedesign.org/fb.jpg"/> |
|   | name="abstract" content="Invision Technical - Spokane Web Design and Development Services."/> |
|   | name="distribution" content="Global"/> |
|   | name="copyright" content="Invision Technical, All Material Is Copyright"/> |
|   | name="robots" content="FOLLOW,INDEX"/> |

[Devanur-Rafi]

Agree with Travis if you want to go in for social media tags:

Here you go for more:

http://moz.com/blog/meta-data-templates-123

and here:

http://www.quicksprout.com/2013/03/25/social-media-meta-tags-how-to-use-open-graph-and-cards/

[Devanur-Rafi]

The page level meta robots tag perfectly complements the robots.txt file. For example, if you have blocked a page or a section of your site using robots.txt file, Google will definitely not index the blocked content while crawling your website but, they can crawl the blocked content from other sources on the Internet where there are links to the blocked content. That is the reason you see in Google results that says,"A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more."

So to completely stop Google from indexing your content, you should go in for the page level meta robots tag along with the robots.txt.

Here you go for more:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/156449?hl=en

Best,

Devanur Rafi

[MoosaHemani]

Not all the Meta tags are important but it’s very much depends upon your use… if you are doing it for search engines the priority will be different then for paid ads.

For search engine the two Meta tags that I find worth using are Meta title and Meta description. Title is important both from the bot’s perspective as well as users read it! Whereas description Google (big might use it a s a ranking signal) does not use it as a ranking signal but still users read it and it can tremendously increase your click through rate.

For PPC the addition would be the Meta keyword tag as Google increase the quality score with the Meta keyword tag. (According to some reports Bing use Meta keywords as a ranking signal)

Tip: Do not stuff the any tag with keywords in it and make it look natural even with the keyword tag, include on the keywords that are important.

Google understand the following Meta tags (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/79812?hl=en) but using them all at once place is not the right choice in my opinion… for instance if you are using robots.txt file then there is no use of including Meta robots tag.

Hope this helps!

[Travis_Bailey]

Meta keywords is pretty much useless, though I've heard it may mildly increase quality score in PPC. I don't do paid advertising, so I can't say for sure.

Meta description is grand.

Open Graph meta helps with sharing on Facebook.

Twitter card markup can be helpful, but mostly if you're hardcore about Twitter.

Cards markup uses Open Graph as well, so if you're not too crazy about stuffing your head with every tag known to man, OG should suffice for social meta.

[Devanur-Rafi]

Hi Scott,

Other than the following 3, I don't think you should bother about anything else:

1. (this can also be declared in the HTTP header also instead of the section)

2. The title tag (this is not a meta tag and can be declared as follows in the section:

For example:
<title>Your title goes here</title>

3. The meta description tag

Here you go for the list of meta tags that Google recognizes:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/79812?hl=en

Hope that helps.

Best,

Devanur Rafi