Meta tags
What are Meta tags?
Meta tags, which are embedded in the HTML code of a webpage, provide useful information that are not defined by other HTML elements. Meta tags are information inserted into the "head" area of web pages. In other words, Meta tags go in between the "opening" and "closing" Head tags. Other than the title tag, which typically has the page title, information in the head area of web pages is not seen by those viewing the pages in browsers. Please note that the title tag is also used as the words to describe the web page when someone adds it to their "Favorites" or "Bookmarks" lists. Meta tags' function is to provide information about a document and about a document's content. Search engines use this information to categorize, prioritize and rank websites. They allow the ability to control to some degree how their web pages are described by some search engines or to prevent pages from being indexed at all. Meta tags can be broke into four categories: Meta Robots, Meta Description, Meta Keywords, and anything else with meta in front of it.
How are Meta tags used?
Meta tags are used to promote one's site by increasing the chances that the site will higher levels of search hits. This occurs when the search engine spiders are crawling around the web and recording information about a web page's content. The meta tag is meant to aid in this cataloging process. In other words, the meta description tag allows the web designer to influence the description of the web page in the crawlers that support the tag. It should be noted that this is not the only promotional tool at our disposal.
Meta Robots
A Meta Robots are a meta tag that provide designers a last chance to keep their web site's content out of search services. These tags prevent anything on the page from being indexed and the crawler from following the links on the page and indexing the linked pages. Please note that an major advantage to this type of meta tag is itenjoys full support, but one only needs it if one does not want his or her web pages indexed. We only use this meta tag at the request of the client.
Meta Description
These tags The text placed within this tag are helpful in promoting one's site to most search engines and can help a page to rank high in the search results for these particular words located in the tag. Meta description tag looks like this:
< META NAME="Description" CONTENT="A descriptive sentence or two inserted here." >
Please note that if no information is supplied for this tag or if there is not a Meta description tag, the search engines typically uses the first words that appear on the Web page as the description of the site that appears on search results pages. A major advantage to this type of meta tag is it enjoys much support and it is well worth using. We frequently implement these type of meta-tags in our web design projects.
Meta Keywords
The meta keywords tag allows one to provide additional text for crawler-based search engines to index along with the text of the site. The meta keywords tag is sometimes useful as a way to reinforce the terms you think a page is important for on the few crawlers that support it. For instance, if one had a page about a particular band and one said the band's name at various places in the body copy then mentioning the band's name in the meta keywords tag might help boost the page a bit higher for those words. The disadvantage of this type of meta-tag is it is only supported by some major crawlers and probably is not worth the time to implement. We do not typically implement these type of meta-tags.
Everything else with Meta in front of it
Any other meta tag one sees is typically ignored by the major crawlers though they may be used by specialized search engines. We do not typically implement these type of meta tags.
