What Are Meta Tags?
Meta tags are hidden pieces of code that sit at the top of your website and provide information about your page. To see them, in your browser menu, go to “View” and then either “Source” (for IE) or “Page Source” (in Firefox). Then, look for any piece of code that starts “meta”.
There are all sorts of meta tags you can add to your page, but when search marketers talk about meta tags, they are usually talking about “keyword” and “description” tags. In the late 90s, meta tags played a much more prominent role. All you had to do was throw good keywords into your meta tags, and there was a good chance you could get a high ranking.
Then people started abusing the system and search engines wised up. Now, meta tags are virtually useless when it comes to achieving a high rank in search engines.
What Good Are Meta Tags?
So, you might be wondering – why bother? Just because search engines don’t use them to rank your website, many of them do use your description tag to display information about your website. Yahoo generally displays a portion of your description tag and MSN will usually display most of it.
That means, you want to make it compelling so that it accurately represents the content on your page and entices people to click on your URL. Remember, on any given page, you’re competing with anywhere from 10-20 other URLs. If what you say is relevant, it will catch searchers’ attention and they’ll click onto your website.
What About Title Tags?
Some marketers lump Title tags into the general category of “meta tags”. I don’t consider them such, but I’ll briefly address them here. Title tags are snippets of code that tell your browser what to display in the little blue bar at the top of your web browser.
Take this article, for instance. The blue bar should say “How Do Meta Tags Affect Your Search Rank? | Search Engine Marketing Tips” I put the title of this article, which has good keywords, in the blue bar as well as the general keyword “search engine marketing tips.”
Your title tags are extremely important and actually can influence your search engine rank. In fact, if you’re looking to appear for a specific keyword in search results, you should include that keyword in your title tags. They are also what is displayed in search results and whenever someone bookmarks your page, so like your “description” tags, they should let readers know what type of content they’ll find on your page.
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