Metadata is information about the data, and Meta tags are information about the webpage. Meta tags cannot be seen by visitors to your website, but web browsers and search engines use these meta tags in determining different characteristics about the page. Browsers use meta tags to determine how to display content or reload the page for example, and search engines can gather information such as the page title and description, as well as other web services. Webpages are developed using a language called HTML, and meta tags are located between the open and closing head tags in the HTML page code. Having meta tags is the key stone in a large algorithmic puzzle that major search engines respond to. Just simply adding Meta-tags won’t magically raise your website to the top, but it will make your site look relevant to search engines.
Meta tags definitely aren’t a magic solution to gaining rankings in Google, Bing, Yahoo, but it will help search engines to collect what your site is about and connect you to the right users’ request. Meta tags do not affect how the page is displayed. Instead, they provide information such as who created the page, how often it is updated, what the page is about, and which keywords represent the page’s content. That’s why when meta tags are implemented incorrectly, the result can be a negative effect.
Let’s look at which Meta tags matter
a) The page Title, while technically not a meta tag, is often used together with the page “description” meta tag, and the contents of the “title” tag are usually shown as the title in the search results, and also used as the browser page title.
b) The Description meta tag is basically a brief description of your site which provides information such as who created the page, how often it is updated, and what the page is about. Google sometimes uses the “description” meta tag as the text for search results snippets.
c) The Keyword meta tag represents the page’s keywords, but it’s important to note that Google has not used the “keywords” meta tag for ranking decisions for many years because of “keyword stuffing” abuse.
Here are step-by-step instructions on how to add Meta tags to your webpages
1) Open your webpage in an editor. It doesn’t have to be an HTML editor, but HTML editors do help by auto-filling, formatting, and color coding the different HTML elements. My personal favorite is a free editor named Notepad++.
2) Place your cursor between the <head> and </head> tags. You can place your Meta tags anywhere inside the <head> tags, but most people put them after the <TITLE> tag and before any CSS or scripts. And remember Metadata is always passed as name/value pairs, where the name is the type of the Meta tag, and the value is the content of the Meta tag.
3) Type: <meta name=”description” content=”
4) Now type the description of this webpage up to 400 characters long. Ideally, your description should be no longer than 155 characters (including spaces).
5) Close the line with “> symbol. If you are writing an XHTML page, you’ll need to close the line with ” />.
6) Continue to add additional meta tags in the same way described in steps 3, 4 & 5, but start with the appropriate meta type opening <meta, indicate the type of tag it is: name=”” or http-eqiv=””, enclose the contents of the meta tag in quotes in the: content=””, and close the whole tag with: > or / >.
Feel free to contact us for help on entering Meta tags!
Avoid Meta tag stuffing
Search engines will correlate meta tags with page content, rejecting the meta tags that don’t match the words on the page. This just emphasizes the importance in having quality “keyword-optimized” content on your site.
“Description” tells the search engine what your page or site is about and you need to write a good description. When Google’s algorithm decides a description is badly written or inaccurate based on the page content, it will replace that description with its own version of what is on the page.
You have to create unique meta tags for each page of your website. If you are placing words in these meta tags that are not related to the specific page the tag is on, then it is considered meta tag stuffing. The search engines don’t like this (especially Google) and your site could, and most likely will be penalized in the rankings for it.