Basics about Meta Tags

Basics about Meta Tags

Meta tags or Meta Elements are HTML and XHMTL elements that provide 

information about Web Page.Most used meta tags are: Title,Description,

Keywords,Author etc..Altought in most cases only Meta Title and Description 

are used.Meta tags also contain technical data about web page code 

language,charset and to allow or disallow crawling of web page by different 

search engine robots.

Robots(Web crawlers,Web spiders) are computer programs used by 

search engines that creates copy of crawled web page in search engine 

index.Index is database of copied web pages crawled by robot.Index is 

used by search engines to provide user almost instant results when they 

are searching the internet.

Meta tags(Title and Description,sometimes Keywords) are one of the biggest 

factors that shows search engines what your web page is about.Web pages

 with no meta tags are seen in eyes of robots like low priority web pages and 

therefore they mostly will rank at end of search results for given query.

On most blogging platforms Meta Title and Description can be set in options 

of blog,so there is no need to change any source code of blog.
If you are owner of blog or website you can use tools like meta blog stats to 

ensure that your meta tags are set up correctly.Your meta tags should be 

related to your website or blogs content.

If you host blog for example about gaming,you should metion words like games 

or gaming in your meta title and description so that the users and the robosts 

know what your blog is about.This way Serach engine will give you better place 

in Search results for keyword gaming or games, and the users will have better 

idea on what to expect on your blog before they enter.

So you don't only write your meta tags for robots,you write it for human 

visitors too.
Keep in mind that if you put something like this:"Games,Gaming,Gamers,

Fun games" as yout meta Description you will get penalty by search engines 

for keyword stuffing,and probably users wont click your site form search 

engine results if they see unattractive text like that in description.

Keyword stuffing is action where user tries to manipulate search engine 

results by putting alot of keywords in title,description and body of the page, 

making the page unreadable for human visitor in exchange for higher ranking 

in the search engine results.Search engines algotihm has evolved trought the 

years and is now fully capable to recognize when someone is trying to do this, 

some users have done keyword stuffing by putting keywords in the bottom of 

page and putting it in the same color as web page background,that way they 

did stuffing and it doesn't bother visitor to read normal text in body,in most

 cases visitor can't notice that web page is doing keyword stuffing,luckly 

agian search engine algoritam is designed to recognize this and people caught 

using this tehniques can get they web site or blog banned permenatly from 

search engines.

Almost all search engines(Bing,Yahoo,Google..) today uses only Title and 

Description Meta tag while Keyword meta tag is only used by Yahoo.

For optimal results your meta tags should look like this:

<title>Site name - Page title - Keyword description</title>
<meta name="description" content="Describe the content of the page here 

in short using relevant words" >