Welcome to another post, in this post we shall be looking at yet another common tag used in HTML… Meta Tags…. I chose to discuss Meta tags today because anyone who has a website or blog or is planning to create one will obviously want that website/blog to be found by search engines(Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.) and in so doing increase their reader base/traffic to their site.
Search Engines have become the most used tool on the internet today to find relevant information about just any thinkable topic and it is expedient that your website/blog gets found in this large sea of information that is available on the World Wide Web….. Wouldn’t it be very awful if someone was searching for information on a subject you know so well and you have taken the time to explain it in a well detailed manner on your site but can’t seem to see your site but all the person sees is other crappy websites that show up in their search result, that is why it is important to use Meta tags…
Well, Meta tags are special tags in HTML that allow the HTML coder(the person that writes the website or edits it) to specify a description and keywords that a search engine can run through to see if the website is relevant to the search criteria. It allow you to specify a description of your site that the user(the person searching) will see in his/her search result so that he/she can make the best choice of website to view.
To use Meta tags in a website is very easy, you use the tags <meta>. Unlike other tags like the <body> tag which have closing a tag, the <meta> tags doesn’t have a closing tag. The <meta> tag provides metadata about the HTML document, metadata is simply information about the HTML or website/blog data. Metadata will not be displayed on the page, but can be read by search engines.
Meta elements are typically used to specify page description, keywords, author of the document, last modified etc.
The <meta> tag always goes inside the head element.
E.g.
<html>
<head>
<meta data goes here>
</head>
</html>
The metadata can be used by browsers in knowing how the content of a webpage is displayed or reloaded; it is also used by search engines in finding out relevant content using keywords; or other web services.
For specifying a description for a site, i.e. the description a person will see when he/she searches for your site we use the below:
<meta name="description" content="A place where everything relating to websites and blogs is discussed" />
You replace everything in between the double quote of the content with your own description E.g.
content=“put you own description here”
content=“put you own description here”
To specify a keyword for a search engine to use to categorize your site content you use:
<meta name="keywords" content="AAA, BBBBB, CCCCCC" />
Where AAA, BBBBB, CCCCCCC represent your own keywords. You can specify as many keywords as you like as long as you separate each one with a comma, for example
<meta name="keywords" content="HTML, CSS, XML, BLOGS, WEBSITES" />
A lot of webmasters have used <meta> tags for spamming, like repeating keywords (or using wrong keywords) for higher ranking. Therefore, most search engines have stopped using <meta> tags to index/rank pages.
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