Learning about meta tags is crucial for better performance of your website in Search engines. Lets try to understand this concept.

What are Meta Tags?

It is a series of statement that you can use while developing your website in order to let he search engine know about each of your individual webpages. Meta tags are written within the code and this is invisible to those who visit your site. It is targetted to the search engine performance only.

Importance of Meta tags:

The search engines determines following informations about the Meta tags:

-- Is the content of the page relevant?

-- It determines the content of the page like What is the page all about etc.

-- It also helps the search engine to determine where to rank your website.

-- Search engines determines whether the meta tags relates to the content of the webpage.

Word of causion while using Meta Tags:

Since meta tags helps the search engines to determine the content of the web pages, it is thus important to make sure that the content of the webpage goes well with the meta tags. Otherwise this will have a negative impact on your website to the extent that it might get banned by the search engines.

E..g: While creating meta tags for your company homepage, it is important to include those "Key phrases" onto the meta tags that well describes about the content of the page.

How to view meta tags and where?

To view meta tags it s actually quite simple if you know what to look for! There are 3 specific things to look for:

1) Title

2) Description

3) Keywords.

E..g:

<title>This is the title you will see at the top of your web browser! The title may be the most important of all 3 meta tags. If you look at the top of your browser, you will be able to see the title of the website.</title>

<META name="description" content="This is the place to describe about your webpage. Very few search engines looks at this meta tags. Keep the description to about 100-200 words. Do not copy what your wrote within your title and make your description appealing to read.">

TIP: You must include the "code" indicated in bold in order for your meta tags to work. So many web sites have meta tags that are never read by search engines because there is a flaw within the meta tags.

<META name="keywords" content="The key words meta tag gives key words that you want your site should have in order to be listed in when someone searches those key words. In other words, if you want your site to be listed when someone searches "website design company" or "website development company", You would add "website design company" or "website development company" within the keywords meta tags. Unfortunately due to over spamming by many web sites before you, search engines rarely pay attention to the "keyword" meta tags but still its a good practice.

Conclusion:

Different search engine has different way to look at your "Keyword". No one knows about them except those who program them. So try to avoid those who falcifies saying that they know what the search engines are looking for.

How to view a web site meta tags!

Right click on your mouse and select the option "View Source". This will open another word document to show you the web site's "Code". Meta Tags are typically near the top of the document.