Wednesday, July 28, 2010

How To Use HTML Meta Tags

Want to get a top ranking in search engines? No problem! All you need to do is add a few magical "meta tags" to your web pages, and you'll skyrocket to the top of the listings.
If only it were so easy. Let's make it clear:

  • Meta tags are not a magic solution.
  • Meta tags are not a magic solution.
  • Meta tags are not a magic solution.
Meta tags have never been a guaranteed way to gain a top ranking on crawler-based search engines. Today, the most valuable feature they offer the
web site owner is the ability to control to some degree how their web pages are described by some search engines. They also offer the ability to prevent pages from being indexed at all. This page explores these and other meta tag-related features in more depth.

Meta Tag Overview


What are meta tags? They are information inserted into the "head" area of your web pages. Other than the title tag (explained
below), information in the head area of your web pages is not seen by those viewing your pages in browsers. Instead, meta information in this area is used to communicate information that a human visitor may not be concerned with. Meta tags, for example, can tell a browser what "character set" to use or whether a web page has self-rated itself in terms of adult content.
Let's see two common types of meta tags, then we'll discuss exactly how they are used in more depth:

In the example above, you can see the beginning of the page's "head" area as noted by the <HEAD> tag -- it ends at the portion shown as </HEAD>.

Meta tags go in between the "opening" and "closing" HEAD tags. Shown in the example is a TITLE tag, then a META DESCRIPTION tag, then a META
KEYWORDS tag. Let's talk about what these do.

No comments:

Post a Comment