A Beginner’s Guide to Meta Tags

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By definition, a meta tag is a code that helps the search engine find and categorize the content and data that can be found on a specific web page.

When the internet first became popular in the 1990′s, websites relied heavily on meta tags. As such, a lot of people discovered that they could manipulate the search engines by feeding them information via the meta tags for commercial purposes, and as such, meta tags are not seen as being as important.

By definition, a meta tag is a code that helps the search engine find and categorize the content and data that can be found on a specific web page.

When the internet first became popular in the 1990′s, websites relied heavily on meta tags. As such, a lot of people discovered that they could manipulate the search engines by feeding them information via the meta tags for commercial purposes, and as such, meta tags are not seen as being as important for the search engines.

But that is not to say that we can ignore meta tags altogether. Although not all of the search engines regard meta tags as being as important as they used to be, some of them still look to the meta tag when they are indexing a website. So it is best to use good meta tags, as having them is better than not having them at all.

Meta Description and Title Tag

Your meta tag can be found in the source code of your webpage. An example of a meta tag is:

<meta name=”description” content=”Hello! This is the description of the page”>

Description meta tag portrays the content of the webpage. The more descriptive it is, the higher your click-through rate can be!

In terms of length, W3C does not limit the length of your description meta tag. But most on page SEO experts suggest that it should not consist of more than 200 characters of text.

Title tag is another very important element of your page. It should not be (preferably) longer than 70 characters and it should contain your main keyword.

Title tag is what search engines consider first to categorize your page; besides it’s the first people see in search results – so it is very important to make your title tag catchy and keyword-focused.

One more critical thing is do not use your main keyword more than once in your title tag. This could make your site look like a spammer and you get banned from the search engines.

Robots Meta Tags

While the above tags help search engines to categorize the page and generate its search snippet, these meta tags control how search engines can access and index the page.

Popular robots meta tags are “nofollow” and “noindex”. Here is an example:

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, nofollow”>

This basically tells the robots not to index a webpage and not to follow any links that appear on the page. This is a useful tag for pages that you do not want a robot to index, or for links that you do not want them to follow – for example if your website contains sensitive or personal information.

These are just two of the many various meta tags that are used, but these are the basic ones. Remember that although some people do not see the importance of meta tags, they should be used for on page SEO as having them is always better than not having them!

Ayan Sen is a net-entrepreneur who is currently working on three websites on part-time basis while still focusing most of his energy in school. Web development and SEO is his passion and want to do it in future as well.
The three websites that he is currently working on are:

• http://www.steps-to-create-a-website.com
• http://www.get-free-web-traffic.com
• http://www.twitnine.com

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