SEO Meta Tags: What They Are And How To Use Them

When looking at on page SEO meta tags are an important factor. Meta data is part of the code that appears at the top of a web page before the body of the page. It is not visible to visitors unless they view the page source code, but it is very visible to search engines.

Meta tags appear within the <head> section of the page, before the <body>. This means that they are just about the first thing that the search engine bot sees when it arrives on one of your web pages.

One of the important tags to include here is the title tag in the form:

<title>Title of your page here</title>

Strictly speaking this is not a meta tag (they all begin with the word meta), but it comes in the same place. Unlike the meta tags, the title tag is not optional. All correctly coded HTML pages must have title tags.

The following are the most commonly used SEO meta tags for an HTML page:

There are also other meta tags that tell search engines how to read your site, usually beginning:

<meta http-equiv=

If your site has these, it's best to leave them in place unless you fully understand them.

You may also want to include an author name in your SEO meta tags:

However, the author is probably not so important when it comes to SEO meta tags. Most experts concentrate on the description and the keywords. Let's look at these in more detail.

Description

This should be a short description of what this particular web page is about - maximum 25 words or 150 characters, whichever is the shorter. There is no need to reference the main subject of your site unless this is the home page.

Many search engines will show your page description under the title in the search engine results so it's good to write it in a way that will make people want to click through to your site.

Keywords

Search engines don't treat meta keywords like they used to any more. Back in the day, this was a great way to get your page ranked for the best keywords, but then they got wise to the fact that people were keyword stuffing in their meta tags. It's still probably worth having keywords here, but it's less important than the title and description.

All of the keywords that appear in the meta data should be taken from the text on your page and should relate to the main subject of your page. They don't have to relate to the main subject of your site overall: it's this page that counts.

If you put irrelevant keywords there, they could confuse any bots that still take notice of them. If you put a lot of keywords that don't appear in your article, the bots will think you are spamming. Everything needs to be natural looking. I'd keep keywords down to around 75 characters.

Here's an example of title tag and meta data for an article about a Halloween costume:

<head>

<title>Best Halloween costume: Rachel’s prize-winning costume</title>

</head>

Careful use of meta data can make a big difference to your site's search engine rankings. It only takes a moment to include SEO meta tags in an HTML page, so don't neglect this.

ArticleSource: ArticlesAlley.com

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SEO Meta Tags: What They Are And How To Use Them