Meta Tags - How Google Meta Tags Impact SEO
What Are Meta Tags?
Meta tags are snippets of text that describe a page’s content; the meta tags don’t appear on the page itself,
but only in the page’s code. We all know tags from blog culture, and meta tags are more or less the same thing,
little content descriptors that help tell search engines what a web page is about.
The only difference between tags you can see (on a blogpost, say) and tags you can’t see is location: meta tags only
exist in HTML, usually at the “head” of the page, and so are only visible to search engines (and people who know where to look).
The “meta” stands for “metadata,” which is the kind of data these tags provide – data about the data on your page.
Do Meta Tags Help SEO?
Yes, they do, but not all of them and not all of the time. One of the goals of this page is to explain which meta tags help you to get
the word out and which have become passé. (See Know Your Meta Tags below).
If you want to find out whether a given page is using meta tags, just right-click anywhere on the page and select “View Page Source.”
A new tab will open in Chrome (in Firefox, it’ll be a pop-up window). The part at the top, or “head” of the page, is where the meta tags could be.
Know Your Meta Tags
There are four major types of meta tags worth knowing about and we’ll talk about them all here. Some are not as useful as they once were. Others are
worth using regularly,
and will very likely increase your traffic by letting Google know who you are and what you provide. (There are more than four kinds of meta tags,
but some are less common or not relevant to web marketing).
The four types we’ll discuss here are:
Meta Keywords Attribute - A series of keywords you deem relevant to the page in question.
Title Tag - This is the text you'll see at the top of your browser. Search engines view this text as the "title" of your page.
Meta Description Attribute - A brief description of the page.
Meta Robots Attribute - An indication to search engine crawlers (robots or "bots") as to what they should do with the page.
Meta Keywords Attribute
Meta Keywords are an example of a meta tag that doesn’t make much sense to use these days. Years ago, the meta keyword tags
may have been beneficial, but not anymore.
Remember back in kindergarten and when your teacher gave you a stern look and said “if you can’t stop using those crayons while I’m talking,
I’m going to take them away from you,” and you didn’t listen and, to your shock, they were indeed taken away? That’s sort of what Google did with meta keywords.
Years ago, marketers eager for page views would insert keywords totally unrelated to their pages into their code in an attempt to pirate traffic from the more
popular
pages, those that actually were about Lindsay Lohan, or whoever was then trending. This was known as "keyword stuffing."
Google eventually got wise to this and decided
in the end to devalue the tool. These days Google doesn’t use meta keywords in its ranking algorithm at all, because they're too easy to abuse.
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