If you are familiar with Search Engine Optimization techniques, it is most likely that you must have already come across a lot of information on Meta Tags. In this article, we simply talk about what Meta Tags are, their importance, the important Meta Tags and useful tips on how to optimize your Meta Tags for a better ranking with the search engines.
What are Meta Tags?
Meta Tags are the information inserted in the <head> area of the HTML code of your web pages, where apart from the Title Tag, other information inserted is not visible to the person surfing your web page but is intended for the search engine crawlers. Meta Tags are included so that the search engines are able to list your site in their indexes more accurately. A typical Meta Tag would look as given below. Here is what this page contains; you can see this if you click on the view “Page source” from your browser menu.
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Creating Successful meta tags, list of all meta tags, title tag limit, href tag, meta tag analysis</TITLE>
<meta name="description" content="Successful Meta tags: What are meta tags? Meta tag analysis, list of all meta tags, title tag limit, creating meta tags, background meta tags. This article covers the most important aspects of meta tags in relation to website optimization or SEO. ">
<meta name="keywords" content="meta tags, meta tag refresh, meta tag optimization, meta tag analysis, meta tag keywords, what are meta tags, successful meta tags, using meta tags, html meta tags, common meta tags, author meta tag, alt tags, list of all meta tags, meta tags html, meta tag description, about meta tags">
</HEAD> |
Using Meta Tags in HTML is not necessary while making your web pages. There are many websites that don’t feel the requirement to use Meta Tags at all. In short Meta information is used to communicate information to the search engine crawlers that a human visitor may not be concerned with. Infoseek and AltaVista were the first major crawler based search engines to support Meta keywords Tag in 1996. Inktomi and Lycos too followed thereafter.
Why are Meta Tags used?
Meta Tags were originally designed to provide webmasters with a way to help search engines know what their site was about. This in turn helped the search engines decide how to rank the sites in their search results. Making Meta Tags is a simple process. As the competition increased, webmasters started manipulating this tool through spamming of keywords. In turn most search engines withdrew their support to Meta keywords Tag, which included Lycos and AltaVista. From being considered as one of the most reliable and important tool, Meta Tags are now often abused. In the present day scenario a vital feature that the Meta Tags provide to the websites is the ability to control, to a certain extent, how some search engines describe its web pages. Apart from this, Meta Tags also offer the ability to specify that a certain website page should not be indexed.
Using Meta Tags, however, provides no guarantee that your website page would rank highly in the search engine rankings. Due to the rampant abuse and manipulation of the Meta keywords Tag by webmasters, most search engines don’t support it anymore.
