What Are Meta Tags?

September 11, 2009 by D. A. Shaver

Meta tags are found in the top your page source and are used to give instructions to browser and search engines. You can see meta tags by right clicking and choosing view source.

The title is the most important and will appear at the top your browser window and in the favorites list when a page is bookmarked. This title should accurately describe the page contents and should never be something like home or untitled. The description is next most important from a search engine point of view. You should accurately and briefly describe the contents of that particular page (no other pages). The key words are next and they are probably least likely to be used because of past abuse but it does no harm to list them. List the words or phrases some one might use when searching for your page. Try not to repeat words. Remember that the greatest majority of all searches on the Internet are two word combinations.

In these days of dynamic web sites and content management systems like Drupal and Wordpress meta tags are still important. There are many rumors that meta tags are not used any more by search engines because they have been so abused in the past. Search engines may use the description tag in your search listing. Drupal has a module that adds unique meta tags to your pages and I think Wordpress does also. Unless you are creating old fashioned static pages the tags will be added as part of page creation and you may need the add on module to put in custom tags.

If you have any questions please leave them below in the comments.

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