One thing that web designers begin to hear about almost as soon as they decide to build a site is Meta tags. While an important part of building a web site, many people do not know at first just what these tags are and what they do. In short, a Meta tag is an HTML or XHTML element that is used to provide metadata about a website. Metadata is, quite literally, data about data, or information about the content on a website.
There are a number of different types of Meta elements or Meta tags that can be used on a web site. They can specify headers to be sent before actual site content and can dictate the name and content of each header. Meta tags can also be used to indicate the keywords relevant to a site or document or the state or area that the advertised business serves.
These tags are also used in SEO, or search engine optimization, though they are typically not visible to site visitors. These tags give a great deal of information about the website in order to help search engines organize and classify the site. The “keywords” Meta tag used to be one of the biggest factors in a page’s ranking, but this has become less popular after some site creators began using large amount of irrelevant keywords to drive traffic to spam or even virus ridden websites.
Among the different types of Meta tags, the most important in determining search engine ranking is now the description attribute. This attribute contains a description of the content of the website, which comes up during a search engine query. This description is helpful when a search engine can not use a site’s content to generate its own description.
Other commonly used Meta tags are the language attribute, which tells a search engine the natural language of the website, and the robot attribute, which controls whether search engine spiders can index a site and follow the links within. There are a number of other, less commonly used Meta tags as well, but those listed here are the most commonly used.
In short, a Meta tag is a useful way to categorize a website so that it is able to come up in search results. These tags provide search engines with very important information about a web site and can help a user to find a relevant site quickly. Without these tags, search engines would likely depend solely on user provided information, resulting in inaccurate search results and a lack of genuine organization and ranking.
