What are meta tags and how do I use them in my site?

Meta tags are pieces of html code in our web site pages. Some of the search engines look for title, description and keywords meta tags. The Title and Description meta tags serve a few purposes.

As you can see in the screenshot below the first line in a search result is usually the Title meta tag associated with that page on the web site. The next information to appear in the search results is usually the Description meta tag. Some search engines will use the first few lines of text within a web page for the search results instead of the Description meta tag.

When you are on a web page at the very top of the screen you will see the Title for the page you are browsing. In the example below look at the very top of the browser page. You will see the title for that particular page.

To see what your meta tags look like you can go to your web site. At the top of your browser click on View and then Source. This will show you the code for your web site. Here is a screen shot of the meta tags for the above page on my web site:

Here are the meta tags that you should have in your web site:

<TITLE>5 to 7 words, usually your company name</TITLE>
<META NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="This would be a short paragraph describing what the page is about.">
<META NAME="KEYWORDS" CONTENT="keywords that a person would use to find this page on your web site">
<META NAME="AUTHOR" CONTENT="Your name">
<META NAME="LANGUAGE" CONTENT="English">
<META NAME="COPYRIGHT" CONTENT="(c) 2004-2005, All Rights Reserved">
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="index">
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="follow">
<META NAME="REVISIT-AFTER" CONTENT="____ days">

Most web site designers will include the meta tags with the design of your web site. If you are designing your web site yourself you will want to be sure to include separate meta tags for each page of your web site.

You can find more information about meta tags by doing a search in your favorite search engine. There is some contradictory information about the importance of meta tags. I think that the Title and Description meta tags are still very important whether the search engines use them to index your site or not. They serve other purposes than just providing information for the search engines.

You will still want to include search terms within the body of your web pages as well as the Keywords meta tag. More and more search engines are looking for content in the body of the sites rather than in the meta tags.