Meta Tags Explained

Meta tags are the key to getting your web pages a good rating in the search engine results. To understand the meta tags description clearly, you need to first understand how search engines work. Why are meta tags so important to the Internet search engines, is what you need answered.

Meta Tags Explained
Meta tags are written in between the and in an html document. The meta tags in an html document give information about the various aspects of the web page, right from the name of the author and language used, to the title and keywords of the web page. Internet search engines in the past, used meta tags for rating the web pages. However, the use of meta tags by adult websites' webmasters, caused the major search engines like the Google search engine, Yahoo, MSN, etc. to remove meta tags from their priority criteria. Webmasters of adult websites used meta tags to put in irrelevant keywords on their websites, to drive traffic onto their websites. However, there are certain meta tags that can help search engine robots in indexing your web page. For those who are new to the term search engine robots, let me explain to you, their working in brief. Search engine robots are nothing but small programs that browse your webpage. They collect the relevant data from your webpage, which helps the search engine in rating the same.

How to Use Meta Tags?
Let us take a look at the different types of meta tags, that can be used in a website. This will give an idea to you, on how to use meta tags. The list of such meta tags is very long and hence we will take a look at some of the most important meta tags.

Meta Author
This meta tag typically holds the name of the author of the webpage. The email id of the author can also be put in this meta tag. However, this meta tag is not supported by the major search engines like Google, Yahoo or MSN.
Syntax: <METANAME="Author"CONTENT="name, email id">

Meta Content Language
The language that you are using on your webpage, can be mentioned in this meta tag. Some search engine robots use this meta tag to categorize your webpage by language.
Syntax: <META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Language" CONTENT="language">

Meta Content Type
This is one of the most important meta tags. It is advisable to use this meta tag for all your web pages. The use of this meta tag causes the appropriate character set to be loaded, before the webpage is loaded.
Syntax: <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="content type, text or html">

Meta Description
This is another important meta tag. Here, you can mention in brief, within a limited number of characters, what your web page is all about. This is the portion that is generally searched by search engine robots, to find out if the searched phrase is present in your website or not.
Syntax: <META NAME="description" CONTENT="type your description here">

Meta Keywords
Along with the words and phrases in the content and description, meta keywords are also often used by search engines, to sort a webpage into their search engine results. Hence, providing meta keywords into your web page can prove to be quite beneficial.
Syntax: <META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="type your keywords separated by comma">

Meta Title
This meta tag can contain the same title as that within the TITLE, html tag. You can use this meta tag in your webpage too.
Syntax: <META NAME="Title" CONTENT="Page Title Here">

Meta Google
The meta Google tag is specially used by the Google search engine. You can use this tag in your webpage to stop Google from displaying excerpt or cached content. There are other features too, that you can specify using the Google meta tag. For example, you can mention that you do not want Google to rank or popularize the link of your webpage.

Are Meta Tags Important?
In the meta tags description given above, where I have tried to get the meta tags explained, you must have been put into the confusion whether these tags are actually required. Well, though the major search engines refuse to use the meta tags for indexing their webpages, there are certain search engines that still use meta tags and give them due importance in their search engine results. Google however gives a proper emphasis on the Google meta tags, but those tags are no means to improve the search engine ranking of your webpage, in the Google search engine results.

With this I end my article. Hope the information given above, for getting the meta tags explained, has given you a clearer insight into the importance and usage of meta tags. Now, you must be in a more favorable condition to decide, if you need meta tags in your webpages or not.