The Creative Design Blog

If you examine the HTML coding of a web page, the Meta tags are HTML codes that are inserted o the header of a web page, between the “opening” and “closing” HEAD tags. Meta tags provide information about your Web page to search engine robots so that the search engine can better understand what your site is about. Meta tags provide this information in a format that the web crawlers/spiders that visit your site can understand.

Meta tags were the original way to tell search engines what your page was about. Meta tags list information about the web page, such as the author, keywords, description, type of document, copyright, and other core information. Lastly, Meta tags are not visible in the web page unless the user selects to ‘view source’.

Several types of Meta Tags

The Description Meta Tag: should contain a coherent description of the page, and should contain words that are located within the page content.

The Copyright Meta Tag: is utilized to indicate that your information and facts is copy righted.

The Author Meta Tag: is used to insert a name belonging to the webmaster or organization.

The Language Meta Tag: is utilized by regional search engines.

The Charset Meta Tag: is used to tell the browser which character set to use.

The Distribution Meta Tag: is used to tell search engines whether the page is global or locally oriented.

The Rating Meta Tag: is employed to set an audience content rating.

The Robots Meta Tag: is utilized to inform search engines whether to index and/or crawl a web page or not.

The Revisit Meta Tag: is used to tell search engines when to come back next and index your web page again. It has been stated the Meta Revisit After tag will boost your site’s rankings with search engines that credit fresh pages. Search engines, nevertheless, will not obey the Meta Revisit After tag and will come back to index your website on their own schedule, not when you notify them to.

The Expires Meta Tag: is used to tell search engines when when the page and content is no longer valid.

The Meta Refresh tag: is used to specify a delay in seconds before the browser automatically reloads the document or URL specified. It is recommended not to use the Meta Refresh tag as search engines can detect the use of the Meta Refresh tag and they consider it Spam.

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What exactly are Meta Tags?

If you examine the HTML coding of a web page, the Meta tags are HTML codes which have been inserted in the header of a web page, between the “opening” and “closing” HEAD tags. Meta tags provide data about your Web page to search engine robots so that the search engine can better understand what your web page is about.

Are Meta Tags still important to SEO?

Meta tags were the classic way to tell search engines what your web page was about. Meta tags list details about the web page, like the author, keywords and phrases, description, type of document, copyright, and other key information. However, because of spamming of keywords and massive abuse of Meta tags by adult-oriented sites, their significance has greatly diminished in the search engine algorithms.

That is not to say that meta tags are completely useless. Yahoo! And Bing still make use of Meta Tags in their search engine algorithms when it comes to ranking websites, Google places emphasis mostly on the Title Meta tag and the amount of backlinks to a webpage.

Meta tags, for example, can tell a browser what “character set” to use or whether a web page has self-rated itself in terms of adult content. Meta Tags are not always required, but as a rule of thumb, it makes much more sense to take advantage of them than to leave them out. If the Meta Tags are not in place, the search engines will generate their own description of the web site based on the content found within the first 200 words of the web page. This might not always be optimized for keyword density, consequently affecting your page’s ranking in the search engines. By correctly optimizing Meta Tags with your targeted keywords and phrases, you have more control over what is displayed in the search engines for your web page.

SEO tips for optimizing your Meta Tags

Meta tags are not magic bullets for search engine ranking, but they are far from being dead. Meta tags with informative, well-written descriptions and targeted keywords and phrases should be an integral part to your promotional strategy.

Title tag: This will be the most significant meta tag since Google pays special attention to the keywords and phrases used inside the Title tag. Ensure it’s no longer than 70 characters long and insert your main keyword at the beginning of the Title tag for maximum effect.

Description tag: This is the second most important meta tag because it is displayed in the Search engines, and should contain keywords reflected in the Title tag, and an accurate summary of what the page topic is about. Do not use more than 155 characters in the Meta description tag.

Keywords tag: This is the least significant Meta tag as Google doesn’t pay much attention to it due to the prevalence of keyword spam. A general rule is to contain keywords that are present from the page content, with no more than 10 keywords recommended.

Understand how Meta Tags affect your site’s performance in the search engines. Visit Advantage SEO. Information covering search engine optimization, PPC advertising, web design, usability issues and social media marketing.