On-page Optimization Factors: Meta Tags
Meta tags are HTML tags that aren't visible on the displayed portion
of web pages, but are visible to search engine crawlers and when
viewing the source code. They are placed in the head section of
web pages, in between the <head> and </head> HTML tags.
It isn't absolutely necessary to include meta tags for seo purposes;
sites can rank well enough without them, and often do. In fact,
due to abuse and over-use over the years, meta tags began to be
ignored by search engines, or simply not counted toward scoring
pages.
For our purposes, we only use four meta tags, which are what we'll
be looking at here are
- Description Meta Tag
- Keywords Meta Tag
- Robots Meta Tag
- Content Type Meta Tag
The is the structure of an HTML page, showing where the meta
tags go:
<html>
<head>
<title>The page title isn't a meta tag, but should always
be included.</title>
<meta name="description" content="Description
goes here.">
<meta name="keywords" content="keywords go here">
<meta name="robots" content="index,follow">
</head>
<body>
All the text and images for the page go in between the <body>and
</body> tags.
</body>
</html>
Regardless of whether or not meta tags are generally considered
important, however, some search engine marketers, out of the many,
still prefer to include them. Some search engines might still use
them at times, with varying degrees of importance, so it certainly
can't hurt to include them, if they're done right.
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