Meta Tags
What are Meta tags?
A Meta tag is a tag (coding statement)
in the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) that describes some aspect
of the contents of a Web page and is placed near the top of the
HTML in a Web page as part of the heading.
Why Meta tags?
Meta tags are used to give search
engines instructions on what a web page is about and how they should
treat it. These Meta tags are not displayed to humans surfing a
site, but can be used to influence the way a site appears in the
search results.
What are the different Meta tags that can be
present in a web page?
There are several Meta tags that
can be incorporated in a web page of which only two tags are of
high relevance for search engine optimization. They are the Meta
keywords and Meta description tags. These two tags should be present
in every page of the web site.
How to define Meta content for a web page?
Let us now have a close look as to how the Meta
tags need to be defined and organized.
Meta Keywords tag
The keywords Meta tag should contain
words or phrases that best describe the contents of the page. These
words can be separated by commas, spaces or both. This tag is not
shown to the people visiting the site, nor do the search engines
display it in their results, but many search engines do read the
keywords tag and give a slight boost to the page's ranking for the
words that are mentioned in it.
Generally, include words and phrases
that are mentioned on your page and avoid using any word more than
three times in the keywords tag. All of the words in the keywords
tag should be relevant to the document. The order of the keywords
and phrases should be in a manner such that the most important and
relevant keywords should be positioned first. The importance of
Meta keywords in determining top search engine rankings is fast
diminishing, however some search engines do use Meta tags to determine
search engine rankings. So go ahead and use Meta keywords, they
wont harm you. Good companies providing search engine optimization
services use Meta keywords intelligently to derive some mileage
from this out dated technique.
Meta Description tag
The Meta description tag is used
to display a brief one or two sentence description of the page.
The content of the Meta description tag is displayed immediately
after the title in the search engine results. This tag also aids
in people clicking our site if proper and meaningful content is
displayed. So necessary care should be taken in phrasing content
for the Meta description tag.
Limit the description to a maximum
of two to three lines as the search engines do not display the whole
of the content but only the first few words. Place the most relevant
stuff at the beginning of the sentence as it helps in better search
engine ranking. The description should be short and at the same
time be informative. Limit the length of the description to approximately
150 to 200 characters.
Present day relevance of Meta tags in Search
engine optimization
In the past when the search
engine optimization concept was new, almost all the search engines
used to give top priority to the Meta tags in ranking a web site.
The keywords and description tags used to be a very important part
of search engine optimization strategy. Now that the emergence of
more sophisticated search engine algorithms, the usage of these
Meta tags has been reduced to a minimum. A good Meta tag can give
you a small boost in many engines, but you can get top search engine
rankings even without one.
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