by Peter Messerschmidt

Created on: April 06, 2007   Last Updated: April 09, 2007

Understanding and making the most of meta tags is a part of the greater process of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) which- in turn- is essential to get your web site "seen" by the world. But before you can make the most of meta tags, it helps to understand what they ARE.

A meta tag is basically a "label" or "coding statement" that's part of the HTML of a web page, and describes something about the contents of that page. The information you put in your meta tags is part of what major search engines use to index a page and rank it on relevance when someone types a search word into google, yahoo, or some other search engine. Meta tags are placed within the "head" area at the top of a web page's HTML code, before the "body" tags.

There are several different types of meta tags: Some control the actions of your web browser, some are purely descriptive. However, for the purpose of this article, "keywords" and "description" tags are the only two that really matter significantly to search engines.

The "keywords" tag is basically a list of words and very short phrases- separated by commas- that describe the web page. In general, the keywords should appear in the body of your text and be the most relevant to the topic you're describing. It is generally best to AVOID using "related" words, although some web designers like to include the web site's name, and owner's name, regardless of whether it actually appears in the text. Keep your keywords on-topic, and don't "SPAM" by repeating the same phrase over and over, since most search engines will detect "keyword spamming" and ignore it. Whereas there is no real limit on how many keywords you can use, it's a good rule of thumb to no exceed 256 characters, including spaces.

The "description" tag should include a concise one or two sentence description of the page, in plain English. Effectiveness is maximized by focusing on the most important keywords, while remaining descriptive. Keep in mind that the text you put in your "description" tag is sometimes used as the actual descriptive text in a list of search results. If you take a look at a sampling of google search results, you'll notice there are a couple of lines of text below the actual link to each result. That is a pretty good indicator of HOW MUCH of your "description" tag would be visible on search engine results that list meta tag descriptions. As with the "keywords" tag, you can write more than a couple of sentences, but you should generally not exceed 1024 characters, including spaces.

Effective use of meta tags involves not only appropriately tagging individual pages, but tagging ALL the pages in a web site in such a manner that they will give offer the greatest possible chance your site will be well ranked in search results. Thus it pays to vary your tags from page to page, even though it's a lot more work than simply cutting and pasting the same tags at the top of EVERY page.

Understanding and using meta tags well is a PART of successful search engine optimization, but is not the be-all, end-all. As search engine technologies have advanced, increasing emphasis is being placed on the ENTIRE web page's content- however, high quality meta tags help your web pages obtain higher ranks in search results.

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