What is a meta tag?

Meta elements are HTML elements used to provide structured metadata about a web page. Such elements are placed as tags in the head section of an HTML document.

The importance of meta tags in SEO

The two most common uses of meta elements on the Web are to provide a description and to provide meta keywords for a web page. This data may then be used by search engines (such as Google or Yahoo!) to generate and display a list of search results matching a given query.

such as these have been the focus of a field of marketing research known as search engine optimization (SEO). In the mid to late 1990s, search engines were reliant on meta data to correctly classify a web page. Webmasters quickly learned the commercial significance of having the right meta element, as it frequently led to a high ranking in the search engines - and thus, high traffic to the web site.

As search engine traffic achieved greater significance in online marketing plans, consultants were brought in who were well versed in how search engines perceive a web site. These consultants used a variety of techniques (legitimate and otherwise) to improve ranking for their clients.

In the early 2000s, search engines have veered away from reliance on meta elements since many web sites used inappropriate meta keywords or a technique known as keyword stuffing, in order to increase their search engine ranking. Some search engines still take meta elements into consideration when delivering results, though most of the major search engines ignore them. Currently, Google does not use meta elements to index web sites; however Google will sometimes use text from the meta description in search results pages as the snippet of text that it displays, if terms queried appear in that description.

The history of meta tag importance

Just a few years ago meta tags were the primary tool for search engine optimization. Back then, where you placed in the search results was directly correlated to what you placed in your keyword, description and title tags. Wow, wasn't SEO easy then? So, what happened? A bunch of devious web designers used black hat SEO methods to manipulate search engine positioning for even the most innocent of searches by placing unrelated information in their meta data in order to unfairly manipulate their. The result? Spammers, adult content sites and the like placed more highly in searches for everyday products than those sites you would expect to see. For example, and this is only an example- if one were to innocently search for "teddy bears" you might have found sites for "hot Asian chicks" and "discount Xenical" to appear higher than build-a-bear. However, algorithms got better and today the importance of metadata is decreasing day by day, especially with Google. But still some search engines show metadata (under the clickable link in search results), so users can read what you have written and if they think it is relevant, they might go to your site. Also, some of the specialized search engines still use the meta tags when ranking your site.

Common meta tag mistakes:

1. Not using them on each page. The most important meta tags for search engines are: Keywords, Description, Title, & Robots.
2. Using the same meta tags on each page. Repeating your meta data across all your pages is wasting an opportunity to provide a search engine with searchable information.
3. Not checking your meta data relevancy and posting data that could actually harm your results positioning.
4. Improperly formed meta tags.

Important meta tags

1. Description tag: gives a description of your site and directs search engines as to what the primary themes of the site are and which topics your Web site is relevant to.
2. Keywords: keywords tell engines which search terms users are likely to search for your pages by. Keywords should be relevant to the content on the page and specific to each page. Never repeat keyword lists from page to page. That is a common and deadly mistake. Keywords are one of the primary ways search engines index pages so do not forget this tag!
3. Robots: The meta Robots tag deserves more attention. In this tag you specify the pages that you do NOT want crawled and indexed. It happens that on your site you have contents that you need to keep there but you don't want it indexed. Listing these pages in the meta Robots tag is one way to exclude them (the other way is by using a robots.txt file and generally this is the better way to do it) from being indexed.
4. Title: The title tag should be included as search engines look at this tag for indexing as well. Title tags should be specific to the website and page. Common ways to list the title tag are Page Name: Article Title. You can be specific and wordy in a title tag.

How to select relevant keywords

Use the tools available on the Internet! Selecting keywords by hand is a nightmare. There are tools can find that are free and others you can purchase or, like us, you could write your own. It's really quite simple, use the Yahoo! Term Extraction API to develop your own tool for automatically selecting 100% Yahoo! relevant keywords.

How to check your meta data relevancy

Always check your work. There is nothing worse than spending a whole bunch of time having SEOed a site to find that you included poison words in your meta data or put too many keywords in. There are plenty of analyzers out there, I prefer widexl because it seems to have the most complete analytics tool out there.

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