Meta Tags
What are meta tags?
Meta tags are piece of code and text placed in the head of a web page which are designed to provide information to search engines about the contents of the page and to help readers decide whether to click on the link to the page or not.
They are completely unseen on the web page itself unless you look in "view page source."
Optimising meta tags for search engines to help them and your readers find you is an important part of search engine optimisation (SEO), but is not complicated.
Types of meta tags
There are quite a few meta tags, but only two are important when you are writing the content of your page: the description meta tag and the page title tag - which isn't technically a meta tag!
- Description meta tags »
- Keywords meta tags »
- Title tag or page title - not strictly a meta tag, but very important »
- Most search engines look at these meta tags - use them to make you web pages make sense to both search engines and your potential readers
- Content type - used by browsers to display the content correctly
- Others include:
- Robots meta tag - commonly replaced now with a 'robot.txt' file
- Author meta tag - the author's name and details
- Generator meta tag - the program used to create the webpage
- Refresh meta tag - re-loads the webpage after a set amount of time
- Expires meta tag - re-loads the webpage from the server after a set date
- But these other meta tags are ignored by the major search engines, although they may be used by specialised search engines.
Where are meta tags placed?
A webpage is divided into 2 distinct parts:
- 1. Head - this contains instructions for the browser and search engines; details about the author; links to style sheets etc. All of it, except for the title tag (see below), is completely unseen by the reader, but is read by search engines
- 2. Body - this contains the web page that you see
Meta tags are placed in the "head" of the web page and contain information about the web page.
Other than the title tag, information in the "head" area of your web pages is not visible. It looks like this in the source:
<head>
<title>This is the title of the page</title>
<meta name="description" content="Everything you ever wanted to know about this page in 150 characters!" />
<meta name="keywords" content="page title,title,page,this page" />
</head>
In the example above there is a "title" tag, a "meta description" tag and a "meta keyword" tag.
There is more information about how to write description meta tags; the usefulness of meta keyword tags and the importance of the title tag, if you follow these links.
Title tags
Title tags are not really meta tags, but they are more important than any of the meta tags and they are also placed in the <head> section of the web page, so they are included in this section.
Further reading
- Keywords and keyword phrases - quick tips
- Keywords and keyword phrases - how to choose them
- Keywords and keyword phrases - where to use them
- The title tag or page title - the most important tag on a web page
- Meta description tag - essential reading for SERPs
- Meta keywords - what are they? Are they of any use?
- 'robot.txt' file
If you have more questions or you need more help or advice, please contact us and we will endeavour to help you ~ without any obligation.
