What Are Meta Tags?
Posted by SEO Info | Posted in SEO Tips, Web Design | Posted on 09-05-2010
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Meta tags are the little lines of text written into the HTML code (placed between the <head> tag and the </head> tag) that describes a website to the search engines. Meta tags provide structured metadata (data about data) about a web page, such as specifying its title, page description, keywords etc to search engines and help spiders effectively crawl a website. Meta tags are not normally visible in the browser window to people visiting the site.
Meta tags, in certain cases, also influence the way the site appears in the search results by specifying which titles (HTTP headers) should be sent first before the actual content when the HTML page is served to the client server from the web server. Properly designed Meta tags improve site rankings in search engine results pages (SERPs) and often cause an increase of traffic to the website.
There are several types of Meta tags, the most important and commonly used being the Keyword and the Description Meta tags. The Keyword Meta tag informs search engines about the keywords of the site by including some (about ten or so) of the most important keywords selected. The Description Meta tag, about a couple of lines long, contains textual information about the site content for search engines and, along with the Title tag, is crucial for improving site rankings. There is even a Meta tag (the ‘Robots tag’) which can instruct spiders about which pages to index (and which not). Each website page should have its own Meta tags to improve site rankings since search engines consider each page of a site separately.
