What are Meta Tags?

Titles & Meta Tags are special HTML Tags that are inserted into your Web page and are often not directly visible to your visitors.Title & Meta Tags help search engines understand, catalog and categorize your Web page so those looking for your products or services can find you. There are many different types of Meta Tags that can be used for many different purposes.

Why do I Need Titles & Meta Tags?
Every Web page should have a Title and a Meta Description Tag. Your Web page Title is similar to the Title of a book and the Meta Description is similar to the preface or back cover of a book and is used to describe what the Web page is about. Since search engines display this in their search results, it is very important that your Title and Meta Tags be search engine friendly.
Other important search engine Meta Tags would include the Meta Charset and Meta Language Tags. These help search engines read and understand your Web pages better no matter what language is used.
When Titles and Meta Tags are not properly optimized, search engines will have to decide what to use and that won't increase your search engine traffic.
When Titles and Meta Tags are properly optimized, you can have much more control over what is displayed in search results and can influence how people can find you in search engines.
Fact: All major search engines including Google, Yahoo!, Bing and others utilize Meta Tags!
If you're visiting search engine optimization sites that claim Meta Tags including the Meta Description are not used by the major search engines, then that search engine optimization site should be avoided. Visit Google™ or Yahoo!® and see what they have to say about Meta Tag optimization.

How Do I Use Titles & Meta Tags?
Some search engines will only display a maximum of 60 characters of text for the Title in their search results. Keeping your Title Tag under 60 characters helps insure your Title makes sense in the search results. Be smart and make sure your Title is not chopped off!
This how to install them on your Web page. In short, Meta Tags MUST be placed between your opening <head> and closing </head> Tags. In addition, all Web pages MUST contain both the opening <html> and closing </html> Tags to be considered robot friendly HTML documents. Below is a sample of Meta Tag usage and the use of the Title Tag.

Title and Meta Tags Example:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<title>Your Web Page Title</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en">
<meta name="description" content="Your description">
<meta name="keywords" content="keyword1 keyword2">
</head>
<body>
The viewable content of your Web page.
</body>
</html>

Meta Charset Tag:
Browsers and many search engines use the Meta Charset to determine how to translate the bytes in the document into characters on the screen. Basically this helps search engines and browsers understand how to present the HTML code and text found in the Web page. If you would like to learn more about the Meta Charset visit http://www.w3.org/International/O-charset.en.php.
Which Charset to use? If you are not sure which Meta Charset to use there is a couple of options available to you:
   1. You could try one of free Meta Tag Analyzer services that available on the internet and see if it can detect or guess the Charset currently being used on your Web page (recommended).
   2. Select one that matches the language your Web page is written in.
Hint: The majority of English spoken Web pages created with Windows would select English - windows-1252, but virtually any English will usually work just fine.

Meta Language Tag:
Providing this Meta Tag can help search engine better target visitors to your Web page.

Meta Description Tag:
Enter a description for your Web page. A maximum of 150 characters is suggested for this Tag. You get one chance to capture the attention of those viewing your description. Pages with powerful Titles and a short description can pull in a lot of traffic from search engines if constructed properly.
Tip: The 150 character limit for the Meta Description Tag is because some search engines will only display a maximum of 150 characters of text for the description in their search results. Keeping your Meta Description Tag under 150  characters helps insure your description makes sense in the search results. Be smart and make sure your Meta Description is not chopped off!

Meta Keywords Tag:
Most search engines these days ignore the Meta Keywords. However, if you provide words in the Meta Keywords Tag that also appear in the viewable part of your Web page, the Meta Keywords Tag may help your rankings with some search engines.
A maximum of 874 characters is allowed for this Tag, but we wouldn't recommend you use that many or you can suffer from keyword saturation, or even be labeled as a keyword spammer. Just a few highly targeted keyword phrases will usually do the trick. It is also recommended you only include words here that can also be found in the viewable part of the Web page.

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