Search Engine Optimisation
A guide to SEO for the small business owner
This site is maintained by Seggy T Segaran, author of the book “The battle to get traffic to your website”.
Optimising page content - What are meta tags?
There is more to a web page than meets the eye. Behind the information that a normal
user sees, there is information that can be read by software that tells it how to
display the page and how the page is structured.
Meta tags are instructions to search engine spiders or robots that visit your web page to tell it how your page is structured and what it is about. The terms spiders or robots are used to describe software that is used to automatically scan through web sites, without any human intervention.
The important meta tags
Title meta tag: This meta tag is very important as it defines what is shown in the search results page. When you click on the search results and go to the web page it is also what is shown on the upper top left corner of browsers such as Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox.
Description meta tag: This meta tag is used to give a concise description of the contents of the web page. When available, the contents of this meta tag is shown on search results, just below the title information as shown here. If there is no description meta tag available, the search engine chooses other text from the web page containing the keywords being searched.
Keywords meta tag: This meta tag is intended to be a summary of the keywords used on this web page. This information is solely for the use of search engines and is not seen by the user. Some web page designers stuff a lot of keywords here that are not actually reflected in the contents of the web page to mislead search engines. As a result, major search engines like Google now ignore the contents of this meta tag.
Robots meta tag: Web designers can control the parts of the web page that are “visible” to the robots that visit a site from a search engine by using this meta tag. For example it can be used to direct a search engine robot to index a web page but not to follow links from that page. This meta tag is not essential but is considered good practice.
Author meta tag: This meta tag is generally used for brand building and is not significant when it comes to search engines.
Summary: What are meta tags?
The title and description meta tags are both very important. Search engines use the page title in ranking a web page for a particular keyword of phrase. It is also used in search results. The description of a web page has less bearing on position on search engines but is used on the display of the search results.