META Tags
A META tag is a block of HTML code that informs search engines what your website is all about. While META tags don't give you an edge in search engine ranking, they do provide search engines with more accurate information about your website. This helps search engines direct meaningful traffic to your website, i.e. visitors that are interested in your content.
META tags must always be included within the <head> section of your HTML document.
The two META tags we're interested in are the "description" and "keywords" tags.
description
The description META tag provides a short summary of what content visitors can expect on this web page. Search engines will often display the text provided in the description META tag as a summary within their search results. Let's look at Acenet's domain, ace-host.net as an example. Here's the META tag code within our home page's source:
<head> <META NAME="Description" CONTENT="Acenet saves you money on enterprise-class hosting. Visit Acenet to discover your savings. Wholesale pricing on VPS Hosting and Dedicated Servers."> </head>
Here's how the search results look at Google:
keywords
In the past, the keywords META tag was used to help search engines determine how to rank sites in their search results. Spammers and other unscrupulous webmasters quickly found out that they could use "keyword stuffing" to artificially increase their site's ranking. By repeating keywords or using frequently searched for keywords, they could draw higher traffic to their sites. For this reason, most search engines stopped using the keywords META tags as a determination of search engine rankings. There are very few search engines that use keywords for rankings and those that do place a very low priority on them.
Still, you should consider using all of the legitimate SEO tools at your disposal and while it may be mostly a waste of time, keyword tags may help increase your rankings slightly.
Let's look at an example. Here's some keywords META tag HTML code.
<head> <META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="keyword1,keyword2,keyword3,multiple word keyword,keyword4"> </head>
Notice that the keywords are separated by a comma. Again, this META tag is mostly unused and ignored by search engines, but there's no penalty for using these META tags.
