by Stephen Dow – NetSpeak Solutions NH Web Site Design and Marketing
So you’ve heard of Meta Tags, but you don’t know what they really are, and why they may be important to your web site and search engine marketing efforts. Well in short, many Meta Tags play an important part in your site – and are part of its HTML code. They are located near the top of a page, and SHOULD be placed within each page.
What Meta Tags actually do is inform search engines; like Google, Bing, Yahoo (and others) what your website is all about – on a page by page basis. I consider the “Title” Meta Tag to be the most critical of all of the various types because it’s actually the first string of characters that a search engine reads when it visits your website with its indexing spider bot. a “Title Meta Tag” should clearly describe what the web page it’s on is about (in as few “key” words as possible). It also should be written for human consumption – its contents can be seen at the top of the browser when you view a page. In Google natural search results, the “Title Tag” actually shows up as the hyperlink a visitor would click to visit your site. However, writing it to read by humans can sometimes be difficult, since it’s also critical that this Tag relates to other tags, can compete to help you rank, and represent your content.
The Meta “Description” Tag is another important tag – and is typically used in search engine results (particularly in Google natural results.) If there is a Meta Description tag on your web page, it should contain what the searcher is to see when they Google your company. The content within a Description Meta Tag is also another chance to entice prospects to visit your website – not just provide search engines more clues about what content is lurking on a particular page.
The Meta “Keyword” Tag, in my opinion, is a tag that is becoming less and less important. Years ago, this tag was an opportunity for search engines to ‘tag’ your website content based on the keywords listed within it. however, over time, many SEO firms realized that they could use this tag to ‘inflate’ the weight of certain terms/pages, so search engines (like Google) stopped paying much (if any) attention to them. It still doesn’t hurt to install this tag. However, we never expect any measurable weighting of its contents to search rank results.
In any case, the use of Meta Tags is important – and there are many more that should be used. To see if you have Meta Tags on your website, right click on your site and click view source (or, view page source). If you look over the upper portion of the website code, you should see many Meta Tags near the top. Then, make sure that the tags make sense and accurately represent site content on a page-by-page basis.