Meta tags - what’s it all about?
Meta tags are hidden in every web page. If you’re using Internet explorer, go to View > Source, and you should see some meta tags somewhere near the top of the page. Incidentally, when you’re trying to work out why a competitior is beating you, it’s always worth doing a View Source to see if you can get any tips from the code.
They’re called meta tags, because they’re meant to describe what the site’s about. In the old days, before Google came along, search engines weren’t clever enough to decode the content of pages, so they relied on meta tags to work out what the page was about. There are two meta tags for this purpose: meta keywords and meta description .
With me so far? The problem was that in the bad old days, black hat search engine marketeers, would lace their boring sites with lots of high volume meta keywords. Pamela Anderson has been used to unwittingly advertise just about everything.
Once Google had cracked content analysis, meta tags diminished in importance. To the extent now that most Webreality sites have no meta keywords, and yet still achieve high Google visibility. If you must use meta keywords, ensure that the keywords are found on that page, or the engines will assume you’re pulling a Pamela Anderson trick.
Meta description is useful, but not to increase visibility. Meta description is still used by most engines for the description in the search engine listing:
Welcome to Webreality- welcome to webreality
Webreality is the Channel island’s leading provider of web services. We specialise in providing winning web solutions, whether you need offshore hosting, …www.webreality.co.uk/ - 5k - Cached - Similar pages
In Webreality’s listing above, the description comes from the Meta description. Webreality customers will be pleased to note that they will be able to change meta keywords and descriptions on a per page basis in reWrite 2.0.
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Thanks for the short and understandable explanation.