A short guide to Meta Tags
June 27th, 2009 by Nick
Meta tag descriptions are important, but what are they? Meta tags help with the indexing of a website by the search engine. This means that people are able to find your site, and if you don’t have them, possibilities search engines will not see your web site, you wont get indexed, you wont get traffic and you wont get ranked. Meta tags are considered an essential part of a web page design.
What is a Meta Tag?
A Meta tag is an HTML tag which is used to define specific data on a web page, the most common data is description, keywords, the author and refresh. They are placed in the <head> of the HTML document where their function is to provide additional information about the page. This information is considered important by a search engine or a database, but not by the reader who is unaware they are even there. The author of the web page needs this information too in order to keep a record of the pages within a web site.
In SEO, the two most common Meta tags required are description and keywords. A search engine makes use of these two Meta tags to place web pages in their directory and they are also used to provide a description of the web page in a search engines results page.
In essence keywords are used by the search engine to make a web page in order to make a web page more ‘searchable’. They best describe what the web page is about and might look this:
<Meta name=”keywords” content=”holiday, luxury, ocean, family, hotel”/>
Description on the other had is what a search engine needs to provide a short story about the web page. You would include this in the Meta tag and it would look similar to this:
<Meta name=”description” content=”Luxury family hotel within walking distance of the ocean “/>
Meta Tags Refresh
A Meta refresh tag is another function used by the web designer to direct visitors from one web page to another. It tells the web server to do something with the page and it provides the owner and visitors with a simple and reliable method of getting to the correct page on a website without the need to know or understand anything about servers or about programming.
If you want your web page to refresh and redirect to the home page after 10 seconds, the Meta tag would look this:
<Meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”10;url=http://holidays.homepage.com/”>
If you just wanted to refresh a web page after lets say, 20 seconds the Meta tag would look like this:
<Meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”20″>
The Right and the Wrong
There are many who write keyword or description Meta tags incorrectly, and is something that has to honed for best results in traffic volume, rankings and SEO. Understanding that Meta tags are not seen by any reader of the web page and only by the actual browser takes a lot of pressure off and makes them easier to do.
Think carefully about your keywords and ask yourself what your potential customers would be asking the search engine in their quest for information. Never type the same word twice in your keywords as this might confuse some search engines and they will stop looking any further. Don’t misspell your keywords either else you won’t get results from any searches.
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Interesting article, thanks.
I wondered if the ‘keywords’ meta tag has far less weight today than it once had. I have read that Google no longer uses it, but I guess we cannot be sure. What is your take on it?