The Role of a Meta Tag in Search Engines

Meta tags are a great way to boost the search engine ranking of your website. Know that while they’re not the magical answer that will bring you high website traffic, when you apply meta tags with other SEO techniques, you are helping your chances of good-rankings considerably.

The big question for the not-so-web design-savvy: What are meta tags? The phrase itself sounds confusing and intimidating. However, meta tags are fairly simple to understand, but have been misinterpreted a lot since their debut to the world wide web in the 1990s.

Meta Tag Description
A meta tag is a way to get information into the head of your website. You may be familiar with title tags or headline tags, and meta tags are doing something similar to what your links within your written content do. Meta tags are not visible. They relate information that may not be of interest to your small business website visitors, but still important. You can incorporate a list of keywords that you wouldn’t necessarily want to just slap onto your webpage. Search engines will read it appropriately; clients won’t have to see random words on your website in an attempt to get traffic.

Below is an example of an HTML Meta Tag for a hypothetical website selling flower bouquets:

<HEAD>

<TITLE>Flowers 4 You</TITLE>

<Meta name= “keywords” content= “flowers, floral bouquets,

flower arrangements, online flower shop”>

</HEAD>

Important Meta Tags you must use:
The Title meta tag is the most important one to help you improve your SEO rankings. This is what people and search engines will see first after they performed a search for what they’re looking for. Make sure to use your keywords when writing a Title tag. Also be sure to work on your description meta tag and write a compelling description that will make people want to click through to see your website.

Not All Meta Tags are Created Equal
There are a lot of “other” meta tag types floating around out there, but know that not all of them are good for the SEO of your small business design. The role of meta tags in search engines are to boost your chances of getting better rankings. Know that using the wrong types of meta tags can do just the opposite, causing search engine bots to skip your website entirely. Stay away from meta tags that deal with scripts or cookies. They’ve been known to do more harm than good.

Remember that meta tags are not the final solution for increasing small business website traffic. Combine them with other reputable SEO techniques to get better webpage ranking and better search engine results.

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