Meta tags are an integral part of every webpage within every website and it is absolutely imperative that you take full advantage of the necessary meta tags that can be utilized to optimize SEO value. However, there are some meta tags that in our opinion, hamper or slow the process of Google and other search engines crawling through your website. The question then comes to mind, if the meta tags are not relevant, then why do you want Google wasting their time crawling through a portion of your website that is irrelevant? You would rather Google focus on your content and not having to go through endless meta tags and javascript and possibly never even making it to the meat and potatoes of your website. Here are some tags that I definitely recommend you remove from the meta tags within your website:
<meta http-equiv=”Pragma” content=”no-cache” /> - This tag tells browsers to not store a website in cache so it loads quickly the next time it is visited. The browser already gives users the options as to whether they want for it to check for newer versions of the pages when visiting a website so it is best to leave it up to the person viewing your website. Believe it or not, people are still using dial up modems and making them wait for every page of your website to load from scratch could potentially cause you to lose business.
<meta http-equiv=”Expires” content=”Date” /> – This meta tag specifically tells the browser when a page expires and at that point in time, the browser will look for newer version of content upon every visit. Again, best to leave this functionality option to the user.
<meta http-equiv=”imagetoolbar” content=”false” /> – Simply a tag disabling the image toolbar that is commonly seen in Microsoft internet explorer. Again, it is not really essential to crowd this into your meta coding.
Aside from the title, description, and keyword meta tags, there are really not any other meta tags that are really especially important for SEO purposes generally speaking but it is very important to have good quality precise coding that is easy to crawl by search engines. It is always a good idea to reference any css and javascripts internally in the head tags but be sure to place this information below your main title, description, and keyword tags.
We offer complete onsite search engine optimization services where we will analyze your entire homepage and up to your entire website. We can provide your company with professional coding recommendations to get the most out of your website and rankings in the search engines.
Check out our onsite search engine optimization solutions today!