Understanding Meta Tags

Using meta tags has never been a 100% guarantee in gaining a high ranking on crawler-based search engines. Anyone who has a website should have a complete understanding on how meta tags work. It is not a magic solution for obtaining a certain page rank. Search engines have the ability to describe or introduce the pages in a website when they show search results and here is where meta tags are involved. It gives you control on how these search engines will describe your web pages.

People who are new to search engine optimization may wonder what meta tags are. A meta tag is a code or label written in a Hypertext Markup Language or html which goes in between the opening and closing head tags of a webpage. To understand it completely, let's take a look at the example below.

What Are HTML Meta Tags?

On the first line from the example above you will notice the title tag "What Are HTML Meta Tags?" Title tag is not really considered as an html tag but it is important to know the use of it and its correlation. The texts you used in the title tag will appear on the reverse bar of the browser when webpage is viewed by someone. From the example above, "What Are HTML Meta tags?" will appear on the very top bar of the browser when being viewed. The words in the title tag will also be the description used when saved to favorites or when bookmarked. In the same way, it will appear as the title in the search results listings.

The second line from the example shows the meta description tag. It affects the way search engines describe your webpage on the listing. As you can see the texts or words used for the description of the webpage were placed between quotation marks after the word "content=". The example used this meta description "HTML Meta Tag tutorial on what are meta tags, writing meta tags, and using them to improve search engine placement and to effect a browser's display of the page" . Search engines only show small portion of the description of a webpage on the listing so the maximum characters you can used for this is 250.

The last line from the example is the meta keywords tag. It plays an important role in order to boost your page. Its use is to strengthen the terms you think a page is important for on the few crawlers that support it. It is also useful as a way to help a webpage come up for synonyms or uncommon words that don't appear on the page itself. The example used these keywords "html, meta, tag, tags, tutorial, description, keywords, key words, key phrase, refresh, redirect, search, engine, engines, position, placement, listing, ranking, promotion, website, web page". These keywords are extra texts that crawler-based search engines use to index along with the web pages. These elements of html meta tags will help boost webpage indexing and in obtaining good page rank.