Quick
META Tag Tutorial
<< go back
META Tags are quickly becoming obsolete. Google now ignores META Tags altogether (except for the Title Tag), but some search engines still use them, so it is beneficial to add relevant META Tags to your website. Today, the most valuable feature META Tags offer the web site owner is the ability to control to some degree how their web pages are described by some search engines.
The Title Tag
This is the only Tag that is seen by those viewing your web page. The contents of your Title Tag will appear in the title bar of someone's web browser when they view your website. For example, if your title is "How To Use META Tags", it will look like this in Internet Explorer:
The Title Tag is also used when someone bookmarks your page or adds it to their favorites. For example, if your title is "How To Use META Tags", it will look like this in Internet Explorer when someone adds it to their favorites:
The title tag is very important for the Search Engines as well. The text you use in the title tag is one of the most important factors in how a search engine may decide to rank your web page. In addition, all major engines will use the text of your title tag as the text they use for the title of your page in your listings. For example, the website kimlarocca.com's title tag is "Kim LaRocca ) Web Site Design and Development". When you search for "kim larocca", on Google you will see the title tag in the results.
Your title should be descriptive and contain the keywords you think are most important. Choose your titles carefully! Search engines use these to index your site. For example, titling your page "Kim LaRocca" will not bring you a lot of traffic. However, a title like "Kim LaRocca - Palm Beach County Florida Real Estate" would serve you much better. When choosing your website's title, ask yourself: what is my product and who is it for?
The Description Tag
This is a description of your site that is attached to your pages, and allows you to influence the description of your page in the search engines that support the tag. Google, for example, ignores the Description tag and instead will automatically generate its own description of the page based on your actual page content. However, some search engines do display this tag in their search results so it is worthwhile to provide a short description of your website here. Try to keep it 150 characters or less!
The Keywords Tag
The meta keywords tag allows you to provide additional text for search engines to index along with your body copy. How does this help you? Well, for most major search engines, it doesn't. That's because most crawlers now ignore the tag. Again, there are still some search that do use this tag in their search results so it is worthwhile to provide a list of keywords here.
Keywords should be descriptive phrases and words separated by commas. You should focus more on using phrases because that is usually how people enter keywords when they do a search for a web site. To be considered search engine friendly, you should not have more than 875 characters in your keywords and you should not repeat any phrase more than three times. Read this article! 5 Tips For Choosing the Best Keywords
Thank you to searchenginewatch.com for images and META Tag information.