What is a Meta Tag?

What is a Meta Tag?

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Ah, what is a Meta Tag?  If you are just beginning in the world of Internet Marketing, Website or Webpage Development and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Meta Tags have various values and uses for communicating with browsers, search engine robots or spiders (see logo top left ;), and other websites or programs.

A Meta Tag is a Tag containing content or data that is NOT generally seen by regular website visitors and is located in the <HEAD></HEAD> tags of your web page HTML source code.  Normally only developers of some sort will refer to these tags.  For our purposes with search engine optimization, meta tags service a purpose to communicate with the search engine also referred to many times as a spider or robot.

This by the way is how we came up with our logo located in the top left corner of this page.  Our logo is a Robotic Spider, Hence Search Engines Etc.CallToActionsV1

Though in recent years is has been alluded to by various search engine professionals and speculators that meta tags hold little to no value anymore influencing the ranking or placements of webpages in search engines, for our purposes here we will still discuss them if not for anything less then understanding the history of SEO.

So there are potentially hundreds of meta tags and new meta tags being created as, when, and where needed.  Some are understood and acknowledged by all search engines, while others aren’t.  More importantly, some meta tags are designed or assist you in better search engine placements where many other have little to no value.

A meta tag is general located at the top of a webpage in the source code.  It is contained within the Head Tags that look like this <HEAD></HEAD>.  <HEAD> indicates the beginning of the tag section, while the </HEAD> indicates the end of the head tag section.  The <HEAD> section will and or may contain any number of different codes, CSS, JavaScript, Comment, and more.  For search engines you will be primarily concerned with the Meta Tags in this section.  A meta tag generally looks something like this:  <meta name=”description” content=”This is where you place your content and tell the search engine what the site is about”>

Note:  The only tags contained in the <HEAD> that are easily visible to search engines and common every day web users are the <TITLE> tag and the <DESCRIPTION> tag.  So make sure the content/text in these areas makes sense to human beings or you will look like an idiot 🙂

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With that being said, the TITLE and Descriptions tags tend to have the biggest influence on the search engines.  Here are some of the The Tags That Influence Search Engines the most.

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