What are Meta Tags and how
are they best used? Meta tags tell search engines what your page is about.

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What are Meta Tags And How Are They Best Used?

When the HTML language was first created, it was recognized that new tags would later be needed for specialized purposes. Since there wasn't any way to anticipate every possible need, the meta tag was created as a sort of "catch-all." These tags allow Webmasters to issue an unlimited variety of commands, or to provide information to a browser, search engine, or automated program (i.e., robot). The tags are ignored by default unless the browser or search engine specifically recognizes them.

Meta tags are contained in the HEAD section near the top of the page. They're not displayed to the end user unless you view the source code of the page. The two most common meta tags, and the ones we are most concerned about in this article are keyword and description tags.

Meta keyword tags should look something like the following:

<meta name="keywords" content="my keywords should be listed here">

Although you can list as many keywords as you like, most search engines will not read more than about 1000 characters. Include your most important keywords at the start of the tag.

The meta description tag is primarily used for telling the search engine what description you want associated to the page in the search engine's results. It should look something like this:

<meta name="description" content="A short description of my Web site goes here.">

It's essential that you create a compelling description for your page to entice people to click through from the search results.

Each engine that supports the meta description tag will truncate it down to 150 to 400 characters depending on the engine. Therefore, include the best portion of your description in the first 150 characters, but go ahead and add additional sentences to fill it out to about 400 characters.

It doesn't matter what order you place the tags in the HEAD area, although it's recommended that you include the TITLE tag first on the page, before listing any other tags.

Will Meta Tags Improve My Rankings?

Unfortunately, the majority of the major search engines do not recognize the meta keyword tag at all. A larger number do recognize the meta description tag for the purpose of creating a summary for the page. The prevailing philosophy is that search engines prefer to index text that is clearly VISIBLE to the user, although exceptions are certainly made. The engines in general consider invisible text, such as that found in meta tags, as "untrustworthy" since they can be easily abused by an unethical Webmaster. For example, someone could list out many keywords that do not apply to their page's content, or they could repeat a keyword many times in hopes of boosting their rankings.

Of the engines that do support meta tags, none are thought to give extra "relevance" to words appearing in meta tags versus elsewhere on the page. In fact, most engines give words in these tags less weight than if they had appeared elsewhere on the page such as in the body area or the page title.

You might then conclude that meta tags are useless? Well, not quite. You definitely want to include a meta description tag on every page to avoid the search engine making up its own description from random excerpts on the page.

In regard to the meta keyword tag, many experts believe that including a keyword in BOTH your meta tags and in other areas of your page CAN help improve your rankings. For example, let's say your keyword was "Star Wars collectibles" and it appeared in the body text that is visible to the user. If the keyword were also included in your meta keyword tag, then that would reinforce to the search engine that "Star Wars collectibles" was an important theme on this page. Although no extra relevancy boost is given for including the keyword solely in the meta tag, some engines may look to the meta tag as a way to reinforce their belief that a page is relevant if all the other more important factors "check out" too.

In any case, including the tags are unlikely to hurt your rankings if you follow a few simple rules. Be careful not to repeat the same keyword more than two or three times in the tag. Never repeat the same word twice in a row or you may trigger a search engine's "spam filter." Lastly, never include keywords that do not apply to the content of that page.