The best meta-tag generator in the known universe is the human brain.

It's bad enough that people use software to generate entire pages (full of noncompliant and bloated code), but for a few simple lines? Geez.

Rule: keep your meta-tags to the fewest practicable, and as short as possible while letting them do their job. That is because you don't want to push your "good stuff" (headers and body text) any farther down the page than absolutely necessary. Searchbots do not read the web page that visitors see on their screen: they read your HTML. It behooves you to get your important keyword-laden headers and text as close as possible to the true tops of your pages, not just the tops of your visitors' browser screens.

The most important meta-tag is description, because that tag (or some leading part of it--it will be truncated if it runs long) may well be used as the description of your site in search-engine results. For this one, use less SEO and more SUO (Search User Optimization): imagine you've searched for a topic and are running your eye down the results page, seeing which to click first. You want your description to be the one where the user says "Aha! That's what I want."

Do a number of searches and see what typical lengths of description Google and the others employ and use that as a guide to content length for this tag.

You should also put a few select, non-spammy keywords in the keywords tag for those engines that still pay it any mind.

That's it, except for the mechanically required (or well-advised) "Content-Type" tag. Skip all the rest, and sleep easy for it.

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Cordially,
Eric Walker, webmaster
SEO Tools, Toys, and Packages : free tools to directly SEO-augment your sites;
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Hi Owl!! Your point is taken!! Last time I checked I still had my brain. So us newbies should abandon the machine generated Meta Tags then? Well my only reason was that I did not know a reliable resource that I could learn exactly what to do . Further more it gets confusing when so many persons have different ideas about the correct Meta Tags.




Yes, but if you are like me you don't know how short or how long, I mean thats the problem, what is essential and what is not, with a machine the idea is that they do it for us, its not being lazy its lack of knowledge and confidence. If you could point us/me to a place that I can learn exactly whats needed then that would be excellent.



The rest of what you say makes really good sense, thanks very much its appreciated and taken on board. So one question is what do you mean by your reference to "mechanically required" does that mean allways required or do you mean it should be mechanically generated with an online tool, I rather think you mean "allways required".

In summary: It seems that there bite looks worse than their bark. To non programmers and not coders like me, it looks complex and strange, bits of code and funny shaped symbols that don't make any sense.