A Meta Tag is a HTML tag that is used to store the metadata about the webpage it is place on. The information that is placed in the Meta will not be processed by the browser. It does not change the appearance of the page for the visiting people unless the viewer is viewing the source code of the page.

There are two different types of Meta tags, the meta description tags and the meta keywords tags. The meta description tags are worn to describe the website and what it has to recommend. If the webpage is about drug rehab then the meta description would be something akin to “information on drug rehab”. The meta keywords tags are lexis that are worn to describe the webpage that you want to have included in the hunt results of hunt engines. For instance the drug rehab page would have keywords such as drug rehab, alcohol rehab, drug abuse, drug prevention, help with drugs, drug rehabilitation, etc. The language are obvious to the quest engines and when the consumer spaces one of the keywords in the explore engines seek prevent and hits record your webpage will be included in the results.

Both type of the tags are located in the HEAD tag of the html code in below mentioned manner.

The main purpose of the Meta tags are to proved a way for search engines and web crawlers to easily gain information about your website. The more details you provide about your website, the greater the chances that search engines will identify your site in a list of search results for a user looking for related information.

To prevent the misuse of Meta Tags to drive traffic to a site that really has nothing to do with the page’s keywords, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) also looks at the actual content of a webpage to make sure that the keywords are also found in the body of page. For example, if you include keywords such as “gardening” and “pet toys” in your Meta Tags, you need to also include those terms in the body of your web page (the text that users can see when they visit your page), otherwise search engines will simply not consider your site worthy to display in their search results.

Actually, some of the large search engines such as Google and Yahoo completely ignore Meta Tags altogether to prevent displaying “bogus” sites to their users. They only consider the text in the displayable content of your webpage when determining if your site matches a user’s search.

Unfortunately, this is necessary because of the rampant abuse of unrelated Meta Tags by webmasters in an attempt to drive traffic to their sites. Keep this in mind when you are deciding what content to place on your site. If you want a webpage to be identified by the large search engines for a specific topic, make sure that you include the key term several times in your pages text. If you want your site to be listed as one of the top results for search engines, make sure that your site contains well written information that is related to the the theme of your webpage and is obviously written by a human knowledgeable on the subject.

Justin Harrison is an internationally recognised Internet Marketing expert who provides world class Search Engine Optimization to website owners. For more information visit: http://www.seorankings.co.za