by Marco Angioni II

Created on: August 07, 2010

A meta tag is a line of code that contains data about our webpage.  Your website’s meta tags are not viewable on your webpage unless someone is viewing the source code for your website.  Meta tags are generally used to describe a webpage and to provide keywords for a webpage.  However, meta tags are not for the search engine users.  Meta tags are for the web crawlers and web robots that index webpages in the search engines.

On the most basic level, search engines match up the words input by the search engine user to websites contained in the search engine’s index.  For example, if a search engine user searches for the words “blue notebook paper,” a search engine will look at all of the webpages in its index to find the words “blue notebook paper” on a webpage.  If an exact match cannot be found, the search engine produces the closest results. 

In order for a search engine to look through your webpages, such webpages have to be indexed in the search engine.  In other words, the search engine has to know that the webpage exists.  Meta tags help a webpage get discovered because meta tags essentially describe the webpage to the web crawlers or web robots.  Additionally, meta tags inform the web crawlers and web robots of the keywords that search engines users may use to find the webpage.  Due to these facts, you have to be precise and specific with your meta tags.

One of the worst mistakes you can make with your meta tags is to include every keyword you can think of.  If you have too many meta tags in your webpage code, the web crawlers and web robots may construe the webpage as a “spam” page.  If this occurs, the web crawler will index the page, but will put very low relevance on the webpage.  As a result, your webpage will appear very, very low in the search engine results.

In order to remedy this problem, limit the amount of keywords you put in your meta tags.  Stick with one specific subject and avoid including unimportant keywords.  It is important, however, that you do not cut out a large amount of your chosen keywords or else the web crawler may not index your webpage for all of the possible keywords you want to use.

It is important to note that some search engine web crawlers no longer consider meta tags when indexing webpages.  As a result, do not spend an inordinate amount of time trying to develop your meta tags.

Remember, meta tags help web crawlers and web robots discover your webpage so that they it can be included in the search engine’s index.  As such, you need to include meta tags that detail the keywords for your webpage.  However, avoid placing too many meta tags as this may result in web crawlers and web robots construing your webpage as a “spam” page, which would result in your webpage appearing very, very low in the search engine results.

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