What are Meta Tags?
At the end of the class on Tuesday we talked briefly about meta tags. Meta tags include a brief description and keywords associated with your website to help search engines find your website.
They are not very effective because most search engines have their own algorithms to deliver people to certain websites. For example, Google takes into account how many other websites link to yours and those websites that have more “link backs” are considered more credible, so they appear first in the list of websites Google shows you after you do a search.
However, it is important to do meta tags and in some cases they will control how a search engine describes your website when someone finds it in a search.
Creating Meta Tags
Creating meta tags is simple. The two most common meta tags you will use are keywords and description:
<meta name=”description” content=”This is where you write a brief, one sentence description about your website.”>
The description meta tag is a brief description about your website. For example, the meta tag description for our class website could be “This website is for students of Allison Goldsberry’s Arlington Community Education website design class.”
The keyword meta tag is a list of all of the keywords you can think of that you would want associated with your site, so you should think about what words people might enter into a search engine to find your website.
For example, here’s what could work for our class website:
<meta name=”keywords” content=”Arlington Community Education, Allison Goldsberry, basic web design, web design, basic HTML, HTML, basic CSS, CSS, Arlington.”>
Where do Meta Tags Go?
Like the title tag, meta tags go in the head section of your website. They do not appear in the body of your website and are not visible:
<html>
<head>
<title>This is the title of your website that will appear as the link in search engines as well as at the top of the website in the web browser window.”</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”This is a brief description of your website.”>
<meta name=”keywords” content=”keyword(s) 1, keyword (s)2, keyword(s) 3, etc.”>
</head>
<body>This is where the rest of your content goes on the page.
</body>
</html>
More on Meta Tags
http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_meta.asp
Filed under: HTML Help
