Recently I have have noticed an increase in the usage of unneeded Meta Tags in web pages.

It seems that a number of free Meta Tag Generation tools are out there convincing people that they need 20 tags in their header (like this one)!

Folks… This is just not the case. Using too many meta tags can actually harm your search engine rankings rather than help them.

Here is a list of meta tags that current generators are producing:

<Title>!  </title>
<META NAME="Author" CONTENT=" ">
<META NAME="Subject" CONTENT=" ">
<META NAME="Description" CONTENT=" ">
<META NAME="Classification" CONTENT=" ">
<META NAME="Keywords" CONTENT=" ">
<META NAME="Geography" CONTENT=" ">
<META NAME="Language" CONTENT=" ">
<META NAME="Expires" CONTENT="never">
<META NAME="Copyright" CONTENT="©  ">
<META NAME="Designer" CONTENT=" ">
<META NAME="Publisher" CONTENT=" ">
<META NAME="Revisit-After" CONTENT="21 Days">
<META NAME="Distribution" CONTENT="Global">
<META NAME="Robots" CONTENT="all">
<META HTTP-EQUIV="imagetoolbar" CONTENT="no">
<META http-equiv="Pragma" content="no-cache">
<META NAME="zipcode" content=" ">
<META NAME="city" content=" ">
<META NAME="State" content=" ">
<META NAME="country" content=" ">
<META NAME="MSSmartTagsPreventParsing" content="TRUE">
<META http-equiv="Cache-Control" content="no-cache, must-revalidate">
<META http-equiv="Robots" content="index, follow">

The majority of these tags are completely useless, and some of them will even harm your search engine rankings!

The only tags that need to use are:

<Title>!  </title>
<META NAME="Description" CONTENT=" ">

That’s it! You can achieve very good rankings by never using a single other tag. Now this is not to say that some of the other tags are not helpful, some of them are.

To have a more well rounded meta section that focuses not just on the major search engines, but also the smaller ones as well, I recommend the following:

<Title>!  </title>
<META NAME="Description" CONTENT=" ">
<META NAME="Keywords" CONTENT=" ">

If your site deals only with a specific area, city, region, or state don’t be afraid to add these tags:

<META NAME="Geography" CONTENT=" ">
<META NAME="city" content=" ">
<META NAME="State" content=" ">
<META NAME="country" content=" ">

Really, those are all that you need to add. If you are creating a template for distribution or you are including HTML with a script that you are selling or releasing to public go ahead and add these:

<META NAME="Copyright" CONTENT="©  ">
<META NAME="Designer" CONTENT=" ">

Adding more meta tags than these will only clutter the header of your web page and slow down download times. It can also add to the amount of data that you are asking the engines to record and keep track of. This can actually cause less of your page to be read and indexed by smaller engines!

Some of the above tags will actually harm or kill your search engine results. If you wish to have good rankings for a page, and wish for the search engines to visit your page, do not under any circumstances use any of the following tags:

<META NAME="Revisit-After" CONTENT="21 Days">
<META NAME="Robots" CONTENT="all">
<META http-equiv="Pragma" content="no-cache">
<META NAME="MSSmartTagsPreventParsing" content="TRUE">
<META http-equiv="Cache-Control" content="no-cache, must-revalidate">

This tag, <META NAME=”Revisit-After” CONTENT=”21 Days”>, actually tells the search engines not to come back to your site for three weeks! That is absolutely the last thing you could want to tell the spiders that arrive at your site!

Keep your meta tags simple, to the point, and don’t overuse them. Use only the ones that you need and ignore the rest, the engines will thank you.