What Are Meta Tags?

Meta tags are special "html" tags inserted in the head section if web pages to give search engines robots how to index that particular page. Meta tags are not visible to regular users and your browsing software. To view the meta tags on a particular page, right click on any part of the page that is free of images, select view source from the sub-menu and look between the "head" tags, you may find the following:

META NAME="KEYWORDS" CONTENT=""
META NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT=""
META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT=""
META NAME="AUTHOR" CONTENT=""
META NAME="GENERATOR" content=""

Not all search engines uses meta tags and you may find some website with no meta tags probably because the webmaster is not aware of their importance. Explanation of the above tags follows.

META NAME="KEYWORDS" CONTENT="" This is arguably the most important tags of all the meta tags. This are the word if entered in the search engines by search engine user, the search engines the goes into its database to look for a site with this keywords, for example if you sell computer games and your site is called gamesareus.com, if part of gamesareus.com keywords is playstation.

If gamesareus.com is index by google and a google.com user searches for keyword "playstation" google.com will look into its database for all sites with playstation listed agin them, google will them present its user with all the site with playstation as keywords including gamesareus.com. You keywords should not exceed 255 characters, this varies depending on searchengines, some search engines allow more that 255 characters while other search engines penalise your site if you use too many keywords. Coma can be use to separate keywords and you can use two or more word combination as keywords. The is a site called wordtracker, it specialises in analysing the most used keywords on the internet, Click here to find out the most used keywords on the internet to find resources.

Some search engines uses "keyword density", to rank your site; meaning how far apart the keywords appear. Some will only look at the first 200 characters of your site, and count the number of times the keyword appears. Others will index a bit from the top, middle, and bottom parts of your webpage, and search them for keywords. You should try to make your keywords appear up to 2-3% of the total text on a given page.

META NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="" This is probably the second most important meta tags. You should not use more than 150 characters to describe your site but the numbers of characters supported by each search engines differs. To continue with our example from above. When google presents its user with a list of sites that sell playstation, google.com will list he site URL and a short description extracted from the Description tag, so if gamesareus.com uses the following as its description tag: gamesareus.com - the best site for playstation consoles and games, googles.com's out put for games are us will look something like this:

GamesAreUs.com playstation and other games
gamesareus.com - the best site for playstation consoles and games
www.gamesareus.com

META name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow"The Robot meta tag is user to instruct the search engine robot to follow links from your page to other pages and index the linked pages. Below are options you can use in your robot tags:

index - Tell search engine robot to add the page to its database.
noindex - Tells the search engine robot not to add page to its database.
nofollow - Tells the search engine robot not to follow liked pages.
none - same as "noindex, no follow"

META NAME="AUTHOR" CONTENT="" Author tag is just to give credit to the creator of the meta tags, this tag is not important to your site ran.

META NAME="GENERATOR" content="" This tag is also not important, its just to give credit to the utility or person responsible to the meta tags creation.

Other Meta Tags

META http-equiv="refresh" content="5; url=newpage.htm" This tag us not used by search engine its just a good handy tag you may need, it can be used to redirect browser or even search engines to another page on your site. For example if you have a form on your site that redirect users to a thank you page. You can use meta refresh tag on the thank you page to redirect users back to your home page or nay page you like. All you need to do is insert the number of seconds the page will display for before taking users to the new page.