July 4, 2008

What are meta tags?

A search engine uses the information in your web pages to decide on it's relevance, including a special type, known as a meta tag. Meta tags don't present information to a users browser, but are readable by a search engine's spider.

There is a common misconception that meta tags are the be all and end all of search engine optimisation. Once upon a time, there may have been a grain of truth in this, but the reality today is that meta tags form only one part of an overall strategy to improve your site's search engine positioning. Increasingly, many search engines are paying less attention to the meta tags on a page - however, they still have their place in the overall optimisation process.

The meta tag "description" is often returned from a search engine query and is used to illustrate to a user the content or purpose of the page. In your own searching round the web, do you always follow the top placed result, or the one where the description seems to best match what you want? A good, concise and detailed description can be one of the main factors influencing whether a user clicks through to your site.

The meta tag "keywords" is much less important now then it used to be. The 'keywords' are the words or phrases that you would expect someone looking for your type of site to enter into the search engine. In the past this was often abused by unscrupulous webmasters who would place popular search terms in their keywords meta tag, even though their site was about something completely different. As a result, search engines got smarter, and now look much more closely at a page's content to determine it's theme.

back to the faq