How to Define your META Tags in EBI Pages

The following is a guide on how to define your META tags in your generated webpages. It's mainly targetted at google indexing, but the principles can be applied to other popular search engines.

<title> tag

Title tags are the first summary line shown by google in the search results page. So it makes sense to make this as informative as possibe.

The title should be highly relevant to the page and simple
Use only 5-12 words (under 65 characters)
End with '| EBI'
Use the 'crown' (main relevant to the page) keyword only once and as early as possible
Try and connect the keyword with another relevant keyword, eg. use FASTA with Database
Keep all titles as unique as possible
Relate action to the keyword, eg. use keyword FASTA with 'Search'
Replace unnecessary linking words such as 'and' with '|' (pipe)
Don’t obsess! Natural is better, and will only ‘get better’ as engines evolve
Write titles for search engines and human
Know that Google tweaks everything regularly, so there is no perfect <title> tag

Example of a good title tag for the FASTA page: /Tools/fasta/

<title>Fasta Tools for Searching Protein or Nucleotide Databases | EBI</title>

Meta Description

The description attribute provides a concise explanation of a webpage's content. The description is often, but not always, displayed on search engine results pages. Industry commentators have suggested that major search engines also consider keywords located in the description attribute when ranking pages, see article. Almost all search engines recommend it to be shorter than 200 characters of plain text.

Meta Keywords

For meta keywords, google will allow a keyword maximum of up to 80 characters or ten words. Use words which are descriptive of your page and relevant. It should be noted that with respect to google, thirty-seven leaders in search engine optimization concluded in April 2007 that the relevance of having your keywords in the meta-attribute keywords is little to none, this is mainly due to keyword stuffing (spamming), see article. However if keywords match with page content this could be beneficial to the ranking of the page.