What are Meta Tags?
META tags may sound like something from a science fiction movie, but they aren't. They are actually information in the HTML header of your web page. This information is not visible to web browsers but is used by search engines to more accurately list and describe your site.
META tags are placed between the <head> and </head> tags of your HTML code. The two most common types of META tags are the description META tags and the keyword META tags.
What is included in the description META tag is the description of your web page. It is the description of the page that shows up in most search engine results. It should be clear and concise and be tailored to each page.
Key word META tags were used in the past by search engines to provide search or key words to index your site. Only a few of the smaller and less important search engines use them these days. The more important search engines like GOOGLE and Yahoo rely on finding key words in the content of your page. This tag may not be worth the time to implement.
This is the form that META tags are placed on your site:
<META name = "description" content = "description
of your page ">
(Where the underlined words would change with the type of META tag you
were using.) META tags do no need a closing tag (<META>) like most
other HTML tags.
There are also other Meta tags like copyright, author and robots that I will not go into detail here.
Meta tags are not required, and are not as useful in search engine optimization as they once were. They are not a magic bullet to high search engine rank, but only a small piece of a large puzzle.
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