Meta tags Explained (SEO)

Creating meta tags for better search engine optimization ( SEO ) is an accurate job. Some people call it developing meta tags instead of making them. We call it Meta Design! Very often it’s possible to add meta tags in the developing program that you use to make your website. But sometimes there are no options or controllable settings. Meta tags are hidden in the source of your website. They become visible if you look into the source of your page. IE: View Source FF: Page Source Meta tags are placed in the HEAD part of the website. You need a simple text editing program like Wordpad or Simpletext to add Meta tags to your website. Web-page programs like Frontpage, Joomla or WordPress sometimes deletes meta tags once you make changes to your web-page, make sure to check this carefully. Remember, no meta tags = no customers visiting your website.
Meaning of Meta tags

Meta tags are hidden codes that search engines use to index your website. They became important in the Nineties. Search engines were developed to crawl the internet for information. They were very useful in finding your information. The very “first” internet existed of pages with text only. Not much later they added the possibility to add photo’s to the sites and today flash animations are used frequently. So search engines needed extra information to understand the content of the website. That’s what meta tags are for. According to regulations, the so called RFC’s, meta tags can be placed in the source of a web-page. Without a doubt there are people who misuse meta tags by adding keywords that are not relevant. This is useless. If you take the time to make good meta tags, that are relevant and match the information you provide on your website, you will soon discover that your website will score higher than the website of your competitor who doesn’t use good meta tags. By using meta tags search engines are able to show you the best results.

The basics – Meta tags 101

The meta tags will always contain the following : `META NAME="name"` the name of the tag you will define. So you will use this for a keyword or description tag. `HTTP-EQUIV="name"` the name of a special tag you will define. For example the name of the developer who made the website. `CONTENT="value"` the value the tag will get. Here you place the description of your website, the keywords, or you define the number of days you would like the search engine to visit your site again ( the so called ‘revisit’ tag).