SEO RankingsA Meta Tag is a line of HTML coding containing metadata about the webpage it is placed on. The Meta tag information does not change the appearance of the page and will never be seen by the people visiting the webpage. The only way your Meta tags will be seen is if the viewers choose to view your source code.
There are two different types of Meta tags, the meta description tags and the meta keywords tags. The meta description tags are used to describe the website and what it has to offer. If the webpage is about drug rehab then the meta description would be something similar to “information on drug rehab”. The meta keywords tags are words that are used to describe the webpage that you want to have included in the search results of search engines. For instance the drug rehab page would have keywords such as drug rehab, alcohol rehab, drug abuse, drug prevention, help with drugs, drug rehabilitation, etc. These words are visible to the search engines and when a user places one of the keywords in the search engines search field and hits enter your webpage will be included in the results.
Both type of tags are located in the heading of the HTML code on your page usually in this manner:
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Drug Rehab 101</TITLE>
<META name =“description” content=”Information on Drug Rehab”>
<META name =” drug rehab, alcohol rehab, drug abuse, drug prevention, help with drugs, drug rehabilitation”>
</HEAD>
The goal of the meta tags are to allow the web crawlers to learn about your page. When the search engines are instructed to find a specific page related to a keyword, the more that is known about your site creates a more likelihood that your site will come up in the appropriate results.
SEO or Search Engine Optimization dictates that you create keywords that are specific to your site and that the meta tags you create in your heading be found on your webpage as well. So if you plan to use meta keyword tags such as flower boxes and dog treats on your drug rehab page you should have that information on the page in order for the search engines to not throw your site out as trash content.
There are some web crawlers that ignore meta keywords tags and meta description tags such as the larger search engines like Google and Yahoo. These web crawlers will search the content of your site instead for the related keywords that are being searched and this is how they learn about your site.
The reason for this is because of the fact that so many people were using highly searched keywords in their meta tag descriptions and meta tag keywords that had nothing to do with their site. For this reason it is important to have the keywords that you are trying to promote from your site on the webpage many times. You have to have human written content that is informative, readable and related to your page theme for the search engines to consider you for their top results.