The concept of META tags is one of those few SEO concepts, which is considered equally important by each and every SEO expert. The reason why META tags are so effective, in improving a website’s SEO rankings, is the fact that they are created especially for Search Engines. This is because your regular users, or visitors, can’t see the META tags of your website.
Only Search Engines can see, and read, these META tags. That is why, effectively using these tags enhances the SEO rankings of your website. Before discussing more about the importance of these tags for high Search Engine rankings, lets discuss what META tags actually are.
META tags – What are they?
Meta tags are little pieces of information stored in the web page, but it is hidden from the normal user viewing that very web page. These tags are intended to be read by Search Engine crawlers, and not normal visitors.
These tags appear at the top of a web page, in its head section. So, it must be written before the ending of a head tag. META tags includes different types of tags. Let’s discuss about the different types of META tags.
META tags – Its main types:
Well, like I said before, the term “META tags” itself includes different types of tags. Some of these tags are very important for SEO purposes, and others are not required at all. The following HTML code will show you different types of META tags, plus how to use them in your web page:
- <html>
- <head>
- <meta name=”robots” content=”no index, no follow”>
- <meta name = “description” content=”the description of your web page”>
- <meta name =”title” content =”the title of your web page”>
- <meta name =”keywords” content =”the keywords related to your web page”>
- <meta name =”generator” content =”Wordpress 2.0!”>
- <meta name=”language” content=”en-US”>
- <meta name=”copyright” content=”copyright - Free traffic - 2011″>
- </head>
- </html>
And out of the above META tags – Robots, Generator, Language, and Copyright are irrelevant for SEO purposes. Whereas, the tags such as – Description, Title, Robots, and to some extent even Keywords – are considered important for increasing the Search Engine Rankings of your website.
META tags – Impoving your SEO rankings
Some of the webmasters includes a lot of META tags in their website, even create a lot of their own, in order to stuff their keywords in them. But, doing this does more harm than good to your website. So, it is advisable to stick to just META description, robots, title and to some extent even Keywords tags, for better SEO rankings. But still, the most important of them is META description.
META Description:
It is undoubtedly, one of the most important META tags. And, thus, must be used very effectively in order to ensure high SEO rankings. It must contain the simple description of your web page. This tag provide text in Search Results – the snippet of text underneath the link of the site.
Although, Google states that they don’t use this tag for ranking purposes, but to provide text in Search Results. But, that is not entirely true. Google use this text for indexing and ranking, to some degree. Actually, including important keywords, in this tag, is a great way to make a website appear in Search Results. Thus, it has the following benefits:
- High SEO rankings of your website.
- You can induce your users to action – by making it more attractive.
Now, coming to least important META tags for SEO purposes. Here are the following:
1. Meta Title:
You can include a short title of your website in this tag. Although, the content of your “Title Tag” is shown in the actual Search Results. But, it is still advised to put the most important keywords in this tag.
2. Meta Robots:
Meta Robots tags can also be used for SEO purposes. This tag can be used to tell the search engines to not index a page, or to not follow links of the page, and vice-versa.
3. META keywords:
There is a big misconception, in the minds of the people, that stuffing all their important keywords in this tag can improve their SEO rankings. It used to be considered very important till Google, and other Search Engines, banned it. But, keywords META tag is not important at all. And this, actually, surprises a lot of people, who think that SEO is all about this tag.
So, instead of concentrating on every META tag, you must only concentrate on the most important META tags. This would help your website to secure high SEO rankings.
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