Adding Meta Tags, Stylesheets, and a Title
Posted by admin on Mar.24, 2010, under Basics, HTML Coding
<head>,<title>, <meta>
Very important SEO factors depend on these tags. More specifically, the title and meta tags. Some say they’re not that important, but it’s how you write them that determines how important it is for SEO. I always use a nice and inviting description and very relevant keywords. It’s pretty basic stuff, but that’s why it’s in the Basics category!
How do you use them? Well, as any page has, the <head> tag, that includes all of the meta tags and the title, and other various things like JavaScript, but we’ll get into that later.
This is how your HTML page should look if you’ve followed instructions from the beginning:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd”>
<html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml”>
<head>
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=utf-8″ />
<title>Untitled Document</title>
</head><body>
</body>
</html>
The meta tag used in the example above is just stating what the content is and defining the character set used. The title displays at the very top of your browser when you’re on their page. Lets add a few more meta tags, like the description and keywords I was talking about. We’ll also add the location to the stylesheet so we can begin on CSS in the next article.
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd”>
<html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml”>
<head>
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=utf-8″ />
<title>Untitled Document</title><link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”style.css” />
<meta name=”description” content=”Put a description here!” />
<meta name=”keywords” content=”put,your,keywords,here” /></head>
<body>
</body>
</html>
All the stuff on there is going to be covered in the advanced section, so don’t worry about all that. Add these tags and for the description, this is what shows up in Google when your site is displayed on the results page. It goes right under the title of your site (the link) and above the URL. A good description of exactly what your site offers and no more than probably 140 characters is good. For the keywords, you just type all the keywords and keyphrases, even long-tail keywords.
This is not a solution to your SEO problem though, it’s only a very small factor. There are SEO factors that out-weigh this by so much. We will also cover those topics later on! Enjoy.
Did I forget something? Tell me in a comment, I’d love to hear from you!
