Search Engines and Meta Tags

If you have a website and are learning about SEO then you will probably have heard Meta Tags mentioned a lot. The aim of this article is to explain the main tags to you and explain how they can help your SEO campaign.

Many people will claim you can get to the top of the search engines just by having good Meta tags. However this is not the case and the right Meta tags is no guarantee of anything. Below you will find a list of the main Meta tags with information about how they are used.

1. Title Tag

This is not really a Meta tag but is normally considered at the same time as your Meta tags so we thought it was a good idea to include it here. This is the top tag you will see in the HTML of your website and a decent content management system will give you the ability to edit it. You can see the title tag of your webpage on your internet browser. It is the text that appears at the top of your browser or the top of your tab if you are using a tabbed browser.

This text allows visitors to your site to know what page they are on and should give them some information on what your page is about. Also when they bookmark your page this will be the title that is given to the bookmarked page by the service they are using.

This is probably the most important tag for the search engines as it also tells them what your page is about. Almost all search engines use this tag as a ranking factor and so you should aim to include your main keyword in this tag.

In addition you will also notice that your title tag is used by search engines in the results they return. You will see that each result is given a title and a small description in the results and the title that appears is the title tag given to the page in the results.

2. Meta Description

This tag goes into your HTML below your title tag and is a small description about your page. This will not show up anywhere on your website and so cannot be viewed by your visitors. However this is often used by search engines in the results they return as the description of your page.

Most search engines do not use the Meta description tag to rank your website so for that purpose it is not helpful at all. However it is important to use your keywords in your Meta description as this will show up in the results and will show searchers that your site is relevant.

It is often useful to make this tag the first 2 lines of your website content but not essential. It should be text that will encourage people to click on your link and come to your website so should be written with that in mind.

3. Meta Keywords

This tag will appear in your HTML below your description and will generally list the keywords that you want your website to rank for. There was a time where search engines would use this as a ranking factor however now it is not used for anything. As a result it is a fairly redundant tag and can be ignored.

Conclusion

On conclusion you can see that the tags on your website have different degrees of importance. However it is worth confirming that having good tags will have very little effect on the ranking of your website in the search engines and are much more useful as a reference than anything else.

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