Use Meta Tags For Search Engine Optimization

Meta tags are essentially, hidden HTML tags used between section of your blog or website and is used to describe your website, copyright info, author info and add keywords to your blog. This description added by the use of meta tags are shown in search engines.

In terms of search engine optimization, the two most important meta tags are meta description and meta keywords. Meta description is used to add a description of your blog/website, which will be shown in search engines. Meta description occurs just below the search results for a website.

Meta keywords is used to describe the content of your blog/website. By the use of alternative meta tags you can increase your search engine exposure.

Sample Meta Tags

Now, let us analyze (in detail) how we can use these two meta HTML tools for SEO.

Meta Description

As already told, meta description is the description that occurs below your website address in search engines. Now a days, some search engines do not consider meta description when crawling your site as this tool was abused by creating fake descriptions and thus, troubling people. However, it does not mean that we should not use meta description. major search engines like Google and Yahoo use meta description while crawling your website/weblog.
(See the image below. Meta description is highlighted in red)

If you are a website owner that sells something, then you should definitely use meta tags description. If you do not specify meta description tags, search engine will extract few lines from your webpage and use it search results which make it quite inconvenient for people interested in your products.

Usually 120-160 characters of your meta description tag is indexed by search engines. Meta tag description should be as such that it describes your website content in brief.

Meta Keywords

Keywords help the search engines in determining whether your content will satisfy the need of seacrh engine user that is conducting a search. They describe your content and ‘meta keywords’ do the same. ‘Meta keywords’ do not necessarily appear on your webpage. They are added to gain some relevant traffic to your content by the use of some releant meta tags.

‘Content is king’ and most search engines strictly follow this rule. Adding relevant meta keywords adds advantage in your search engine exposure.