Meta Tags

Meta tags are page attributes or characteristics that provide information to web indexers and search engine spiders.Today, meta tags are generally ignored by the majority of search engines out there. The meta tag "description" is used by some search engines to generate a description of your site when they index it. However if a description is NOT present, the search engine will create a description for your site to go along with your site link.

Important: meta tags are of little use when calculating your web site's page ranking. Meta tags were used by search engines in the past to get the "theme" or category of a web page. Because of the abuses of meta tags over the years, the search engines made a business decision to ignore the majority of them in their ranking algorithms.

Much to our surprise, there are still quite a few people out there who place a lot of importance on meta tags. If you come across an SEO (search engine optimization) consultant that tells you meta tags are the key to optimizing your pages, run!

Don't get me wrong, some meta tags are useful, but they have little or no effect on rankings.

The only exception is the title tag, which is helpful to Google and other engines in page ranking.

Meta tags are always between a web page's Head tags. Here's an example of the major meta tags: