What are meta-tags?

You have no doubt heard the term meta-tag before, and perhaps you have an idea of what a meta-tag is, or maybe you don’t have a clue.  If you’re a blogger, you need to know what they are.  After all, you can call what you’re doing “blogging”, or you can call it “building a website”, but no matter what you call it, meta-tags are there for you to take advantage of, and there are some meta-tags that will help you, and other meta-tags that won’t do a thing for you at all.

This post will attempt to demystify what meta-tags are, how they’re used, and if you should even care about them.

Switcher had asked me on my Ask me anything post:

LOL,

I don’t count myself as a spammer, I’ll ask anyway.

What’s your thoughts on “Meta Tags” for blogger/blogspot.com?

The reason I ask is, from an SEO point of view I’ve had the idea for a while to write some code, that will write dynamic content for each & every blog page on my Blogger blog.

I have the code up & running, & actually showing up in the Google SERP, I really don’t have any answers for a long term results. Do you think this would be something that would benefit Blogger hosted blogs?
Ok, let’s hear your thoughts, don’t hold back! LOL

Thanks for asking the question Switcher! I’ll try my best to help you out here.

So what is a meta-tag anyway?

Meta-tags are HTML elements that reside in the header of any given HTML document.  They help describe a page by providing extended information about the page they are found on.  For instance, if you look at the HTML that makes this page, you’ll see a mess of meta-tags in the header area.

For instance, on my recent post where I asked everyone if they had a question, the meta-tags found on that particular page look like this:

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
<meta name="generator" content="WordPress 2.8.7" />
<meta name="description" content="I'll answer any questions etc..." />
<meta name="keywords" content="anything" />

So as you can see here, I have only four tags working for me on this post. I believe that each and every blog system will provide the first meta-tag by default. I don’t believe you need to even worry if it’s there or not. If you can read your blog posts, and no one else is complaining that some characters look like question marks, you’re probably fine. If you do want to read more about that particular line, a good resource can be found here and here.
The generator meta-tag is completely unnecessary, and could expose you to problems in some cases. I recommend removing it entirely as it does you as a web site owner no good, but it could help others determine how to exploit your site and find vulnerabilities.

Keywords and Description meta-tags

Perhaps the two most well known meta-tags are the keywords and description meta-tags.  These two meta-tags were intended to provide search engines and spiders a quick idea of what the page is about, but after a few years people began to realize that they could manipulate these items to increase their search engine ranking.

The best search engines have realized this and have changed the way they determine what a page is about, and how it gets ranked, that the keywords meta-tag is darn close to pointless.  Google no longer uses the keyword meta-tag, so should you worry about including it if you aren’t already? Should you try to optimize your keywords with each post you write even though Google doesn’t do anything with this tag?

Yes, you should.

Even though Google states they don’t look at the keyword meta-tag or even use it, they might one day.  Besides, there are plenty of other search engines out there that might use the keyword meta-tag, so for those reasons, yes you should continue to use it as if it were an effective part of your SEO.  I just wouldn’t put a great amount of importance into the keyword tag as I would the description meta-tag.

The importance of the Description meta-tag

The description meta-tag is used frequently as part of search engine results.  Google uses the page description as part of the search results (in case you haven’t noticed, it’s the little blurb under the search result links) and it also carries a little weight in SEO as well.  A well crafted description can also help drive more traffic from search engines by providing a concise description of the page offerings to the user.

Some blogging tools will provide an area for you to provide a description, whereas others might take the “excerpt” you provide, or the first hundred or so characters from your first paragraph of text.

There might be other uses of the description meta-tag by robots, spiders and search engines, and you should consider this tag very important.  After all, it very well may be the first impression given to a new visitor.  Make it the best one you can.

Are there any other meta-tags?

Yes, there are several.  There are select set of meta-tags that Google understands and uses as part of it’s indexing process.  Here’s a list of those tags along with a quick description of each.

Title – While not really a meta-tag, the <title> tag is found in the header along with all the other meta-tags.  Google uses this tag to create the text of the hyperlink in the search engines search results.  Including keywords into your title tag will help you rank in search engines for those keywords.

There is plenty more that goes into a well-done SEO page, and the title tag is perhaps the most important part of that equation.

Robots or Googlebot – This tag helps you control how often your page is indexed, if it is even available for indexing and what options might be available to an end user on Google.  More info on this tag and the variety of options that Google accepts can be found here.

Refresh – Including this tag will redirect a user to another page after a certain amount of time has passed.  Ever hit one of those pages that state “Redirecting you to your page.  If the page does not refresh after 5 seconds, click here”?  If so, they very well may have used this tag to perform the redirection.

An unending supply of meta-tags

These are just a few of the many tags that are available to use on your web pages. Have you taken a look at your source and analyzed what your software is doing to your meta-tags? You really should if you haven’t. Take a little time to understand them and refine them. The little bit of effort will pay dividends to you later on by helping you craft better pages, target keywords better, and present your site the best it can be in search engine results.

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