Meta Tag Tutorial

Meta Tag Tutorial

Meta tags are fairly simple tags that perform a very useful function. They are very important at getting visitors to your site via search engines. Search engines such as Google are really the only viewers of your site that will notice the meta tags. Driving traffic to your website will be discussed in the SEO Tutorials, which will be created before too long. These tutorials will explain more of how a search engine works.

As I mentioned, meta tags are fairly easy to create. There are different types of meta tags, but this tutorial will focus on the two most important meta tags. These are the "description" and "keywords" tags. The description meta tag is where you describe the specific page on your website. The keywords meta tag is where you list the words the page talks about. These words should appear frequently in your web page.

A meta tag is placed in the head of the web page, between the opening and closing head tags (<head> and </head>). The meta tags consist of the attributes "name" and "content". The name attribute lets the viewer know what kind of meta tag it's working with, while the content attribute is where you put the information that actually counts. Let's see an example:

Yes, those tags are the meta tags for this very page. The description meta tag contains a description of this page. Notice that the description meta tag is short but descriptive. Description meta tags should be short, sweet, and to the point. The keywords are words or phrases that relate directly to this site. See that some of the keywords can be more than one word? This can be useful for targeting specific phrases, but listing the individual words can be a good idea.

The keyword list and description should both be short. The most important keywords should go at the front of the list, in order to give them importance to search engines.

Meta tags are fairly basic. The next HTML Tutorial will begin the forms section, which is the first step towards receiving information from your visitors.

The HTML Tutorials Index

The Previous HTML Lesson - Table Spanning and Spacing