Basics of Meta Tags

Allrite.. Lets get started with the Meta tags. The most basic seo technique. Meta Tags are HTML tags used to describe the content of the page. Every page is related to something, e.g a website about mobile phones have the content related to mobiles. That could be mobile phone pictures, articles, prices, or maybe some applications for cell phones. So to let the search engine know what is your page is actually about, we use Meta Tags. The meta tags look like this


<meta name="keywords" content="(Keywords here)">


every webpage have this element by default. We just need to change the content area with the required keywords. What that do is it tells the search engine spider about the key phrases that have been used in a specific page. Now when the spider reads that tag, it automatically indexes the page against these keywords.


Meta Tags are not used by google anymore. Because many webmasters have exploited this feature and stuffed the meta tags with irrelevant keywords. But this is still used by other major search engines like Yahoo,bing,ask etc. So their importance is still there and one needs to pay attention on them as well. There is one more Meta tag used by search engines is:


<meta name="description" content="(description here)">


Now as it is clear from the name. This meta tag includes the brief summary of the content of the page. Whenever You search something on a search engine. It displays a brief text about the website just below its link. Meta description should not be more than 160 characters. And it is a good practice to use a few keywords in your description as well. But make sure not to stuff it with keywords. It should be written for humans not just for the search engine spider. Because whenever someone searches something, they always take a look at the description text to see what the page is about. So the more relevant the description is, the more chances are that your link will get clicked. So the first thing you wanna do as an seo of your website is to optimize the meta tags of your website.