Once upon a time, the meta tag was king.  Any website without a meta tag was doomed to never be listed by a search engine as it just didn't provide the search engine with the information it needed to categorize the site and add it neatly in to little pigeon holes.  Then the internet really took off, and all of a sudden commercial entities on the interent realised how vital the meta tag was - and how they could abuse the system by manipulating their meta tags to make sure their site was listed at the top of search engine results even if their site or pages were not relevant to the search at all.

As a result, key search engines (Google included) relied less and less on the information contained in meta tags.  Search engines began to write their own complicated algorithms to work out for themselves what a website or particular page was all about rather than relying on the webmaster to tell them

However, some elements of meta tags are still vitally important - not to determine how high you rank on a search engine, but how your site will be put across to searchers when they see your listing.

The Meta Tags and what they do

Here is a handy list of the most important meta tags and what they do -

All of the above tags are particular to each page on your site. Search engines (again, Google in particular) will really appreciate that you take the time to create meta tags for each page seperately.  After all, to use the Amazon example Amazon don't just sell books, they also sell CD's.  So meta tags all about book buying on the CD related pages isn't really that helpful to the searcher.

To take it a step further, if your site is all about books (my apologies if this example is wearing thin!) but one of your pages is actually about the bestselling author Dan Brown then it is in your own interests to specify specific meta tags on the Dan Brown page.  This is because people searching for information on Dan Brown will have more chance of seeing your specific page returned in a search engine when it has specific meta tags.

Taking that on just a little further, if you have several pages about Dan Brown, and one in particular about his book Deception Point, then specify on that page meta tags to do with that particular title, as again searchers looking specifically for info on that title are more likely to have your page returned to them in Google if you have specific meta tags. 

Think of it as a service for searchers.  If your business is listed in the Yellow Pages or equivelent, you really want to be listed in as many sections as possible that your business is relevent to.  It's the same with meta tags.

A Live Example

The above is a result of a search in Google for the term "website builder", which is our main term that we compete on.  In the above example, our meta tags are as follows -

Title: Website Builder
Keywords: website builder,website building,sitebuilder,online website builder,Professional Website Builder,web page builder,free website builder, easy website builder
Description: Website builder - the quick and easy way to build your website, premium website builder ... free hosting and domain ... website builder from $6 month

Hints and Tips

Using the above example, you might ask "hey, why isn't your title very descriptive and only just 2 words?".  Well, the reason is that the title tag is very important (as to a degree are all meta tags) and particularly important is "keyword density".  This really means how often your keywords are repeated on a web page.  The higher the number of times "website builder" is repeated the higher the keyword density, and the higher in the search engine results you go (in theory!).  So, instead of making our title "The best website builder, fast and easy to use etc etc" we have made it really short and succint, this helps the KW (keyword density) and also makes it really easy for the searcher to see that they have found a site that meets their search criteria.

We have seperated our keyword phrases with a comma, and we have kept them to a reasonable minimum - we could have put keywords in there about "making a website" or "how to create a web site" but these aren't REALLY relevant to our business, and besides, we concentrate a specific couple of pages on that elsewhere!

Our description is exactly how we want it to appear in Google, even doen to the "..." elements, you can experiment with this and will notice how much text you can put in there.

Putting it all together
To edit your meta tags in x2cms, click this icon in the editor toolbar -

If you edit the tags on the index.html page, and click "save template" those tags will be saved across every page on your website.  Then you can open specific pages, open the tags on each page and choose "save content" and you will update the tags for that page only.

As a last note, if you are optomising your meta tags so you can see results in Google, remember that you will need to wait until the Google spider revisits your site before you will notice any changes in your listing.  This can take a couple of hours - or a couple of months!

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