What Is A Meta Tag?

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When you sit down to research optimizing your website for search engines, one of the first steps you are likely to come across is creating and implementing meta tags. Unfortunately, not many people know exactly what a meta tag is or what its purpose is. Understanding the purpose of meta tags and how to use them can help you create a website that is more easily crawled by search engine spiders, and will therefore improve your rankings.

Meta tags have been in existence since long before search engines, although today they are used primarily by search engines to index content for websites. Quite simply, Meta tags are keywords located in the code of your site that contain information to let spiders know how to crawl and index your pages. Visitors to your site will never see your meta tags unless they view your code. Still, they are an important part of any website.

Search engines don’t divulge exactly what weight meta tags carry in determining where your site appears in search results, but they do have some impact. When search engines first began developing the formula for ranking pages, the meta tag ...
... played a large role. It was the primary focus of site indexing. For this reason, most Internet Marketing consultants carefully review meta tags to ensure that they are providing the correct information. Today it is widely assumed that larger engines like Google and Bing place less weight on meta tags than in the past, though the smaller search engines still focus on them. This shift in thinking is a direct result of unscrupulous tactics like word stuffing (filling the meta tags with an overabundance of keywords). Because many of the major search engine sites realized that web masters were stuffing their meta tags with large lists of keywords, the search engines began to turn away from them as a means for determining the relevancy of a site. Regardless, they are still a factor in search engine optimization, and should not be ignored.

Properly crafted meta tags provide metadata about a specific page. This information may include any information not provided in headings or other structural elements of the website. Examples include keywords and page descriptions.

When creating a meta tag, the writer must carefully consider which keywords they include in it. It is crucial that each keyword or phrase used in the meta tag be used in the body of the website. The spiders don’t ‘like’ it when metadata is stuffed with keywords that are not used in the content of the website.

At the end of the day, meta tags are an integral part of all web pages, but their value in terms of SEO is now questionable. Still, properly crafting a meta tag that will interest the spiders that do crawl it is important. Having the proper title in your meta tags is a step that can have some impact in the overall visibility of your site.

Still not sure about metatags? Contact us today for a no-obligation analysis.