What's a Meta? A Basic Meta Tags Overview

It's another one of those boring, not-quite-esoteric topics that can make or break a web site: Meta Tags. These are a series of "additional information" blocks between the <> and < /head > tags on an HTML page that give the spiders and people using search engines more information and a better way to determine if your site is what they're seeking.

There are five big META tag categories you should use on every page in your web site:

• Author: That's you, the person who created the web site.
• Description: The description META tag content is what appears in a search engine results description of the page. If you don't have it, the spider just posts the first text it finds, which is usually some meaningless string of text ending in "...". For those of you who've seen this, you know how unprofessional that looks. You should keep this to 200 characters or less, or your description will end in "..."
• Robots: The robots META tag tells the spiders that come to your site what to do with your page. I recommend the command "index, follow", which tells the spider to index your page in the search engines and follow all the links to their destination pages. "noindex" tells the spider not to index your pages into the search engines, and "nofollow" tells it not to follow the links. These are good for specific purposes, but if you're just starting out, use "index, follow" until you're more adept at web theory.
• Keywords: The keywords META tag is a big one. It contains the search terms for which you want your site to appear and is a big part of search engine optimization. How close your pages appear toward the #1 position in a search for a keyword depends on it's page rank and term relevance, so choose the words you put in this tag wisely. Keyword manipulation is a major topic of its own and is something I recommend you study further if you want a successful site.
• Title: This is the description that appears in the title bar on top of the page. While this one is not specifically a META tag, it is important because it shows one of the first things your visitor might see and use to determine the nature of your site. You place it between the <> and < /TITLE > tags in the form:

  <>(Your page's site title here)< /TITLE >

  I usually use my site name plus the page name in my title blocks. For example, "Financial Self-Reliance - Web Site Articles".

As far as how to make a META tag, use the following form:

< name="(what this tag is)" content="(what this tag has in it)">

For example:

< name="Description" content="This is the I Love Dogs Web Site. It's about dogs and how to take care of them.">

When this comes up in the search engine, the indexed view of this site would appear as

(Page Title as listed between the <> and < /TITLE > tags) This is the I Love Dogs Web Site. It's about dogs and how to take care of them. the site URL)

META tags are the small touches that can help make your site better. They're of great benefit to people surfing search engines trying to find information and could mean those people choose you over someone else. In the case of keywords, they're critical, as the spiders use them to index you to the keyword searches where you want to be shown. So don't neglect your META tags.