1. What is a Meta Tag?

A Meta tag appears in the header portion of a web page. They supply various bits of information about the page but are not viewed (do not affect display of the page). Most web pages will contain a header section, a body section and optionally a footer. The header area is usually reserved for non-displaying information, scripts, comments etc.

2. Do search engines read Meta tags and do they rank my site based on them?

Some search engines do read the tags. The consensus among search engine experts is that Meta tags do not have a significant impact on how your site is ranked. The amount of effort to include the tags is minimal and so we recommend you include them in your web design. They also will help you keep focused on what the main content of the particular page is.

3. What about the Title tag?

Each web page should have a title tag. Strictly speaking the title tag is not a Meta tag. In fact the title tag is quite important to most of the major search engines and is usually displayed in the search results (serps- search engine results pages). A title tag is composed as follows: <title>Standard Meta Tags</title> If you select view source on this page, you will see the Title tag we have included. Title tags should reflect the main content of a page. If we were targeting web hosting in Canada on this page then our title would be as follows: <web hosting canada | canadian web hosting - canada websites> It is permissible to add certain characters to help separate the words but beware that special characters such as the "star" are frowned upon. Web Tip: Many pages use the title tag to display the company or web site name, generally this is a wasted effort since the viewer will already know the company/website name and the company/website name can be prominently displayed on the page itself. Unless you are a major brand people will not be searching for your company name but rather your specific topic and so it is best to have that topic reflected in the title.

4. What are the main "Standard" Meta Tags?

The Meta Description Tag, is coded as follows: <meta name="description" content=" some content about your page"> Using our web hosting example you might write the tag in this way: <meta name="description" content="Our sponsor Chinook Webs provides advanced hosting on a windows platform and industry leading technical support"> To see what our description tag is for this page click on view source

The Meta Keywords Tag, is coded as follows: <meta name="keywords" content="keywords "> Keywords / phrases are words and phrases you have targeted for this specific page, these should be words that your visitors will type in to the search engines to find your site. Using our web hosting example you could write the keywords tag as follows: <meta name="keywords" content=" host canada canadian web hosting " Keyword tags are largely ignored by the search engines but again they come in useful when developing your page since you should be including those words throughout the text.

The Meta Language Tag, is coded as follows: <meta http-equiv="content-language" content="en"> The language tag declares the natural language of the web page. The tag is useful for non-english websites. Below are some samples of languages:   DE (German)   EN-GB (English-Great Britain)   EN-US (English-United States)   FR (French)   IT (Italian)

The Meta Robots Tag, is coded as follows: <meta name="robots" content="index,follow" Other options are noindex, nofollow. Additonal tags for specific engines are: <meta name="googlebot" content="noarchive, nofollow"> <meta name="msnbot" content="noindex,nofollow"> Generally it is better to include a robots.txt file in your web site.

5. What are some of the other Meta tags?

<META name="Abstract" content="Abstract phrase"> <META name="Author" content="Author Information"> <META name="Copyright" content="Copyright Statement"> <META name="Expires" content="Sun, 19 Sept 2004 12:59:59 GMT"> <META name="Revisit-After" content="5 Days">