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Keep META Tags Short But Concise
Many webmasters realize that search engines use Description and Keyword
META tags heavily and try taking advantage of this by writing very long
descriptions and keywords. Search engines have a finite database and will
only index a certain portion of your website. Try to keep your META tags
simple and to the point. Search engines take into account the number of
occurrences of each tag and may penalize your website's rankings if you
overuse META tags.
Avoid Using All Upper Case (Caps)
Some search engines used to prioritize websites that started with capital
letters or those that had special characters such as numbers. This technique
may still work with some older search engines, but beware that search
engines are constantly on the lookout for abusers.
Avoid "Bridge" Pages
Bridge pages are pages which redirect a user to another page, which is
often the page that the webmaster intended a user to go to directly. This
practice is strongly discouraged by search engines as it clutters their
databases with useless pages and opens the opportunity for users to spam
search engines with irrelevant pages. Bridge pages are mostly associated
with the META Refresh Tag.
Avoid Repetition
Try to avoid repeating the same keywords or descriptions in your meta tags.
Often, search engines will degrade your rankings when they detect repetition
of the same words in your META Tags. Should you need to use repetition,
separate the repeated words from each other by a few other keywords.
Prioritize Your Keywords
Some search engines will read only the first few lines of your webpages to
get an overview of your website. Search engines which do this may miss
some of your META tags. As such, you should put focus on your description
and keywords META tags with priority on the first few words.