What is a meta tag and do they matter?
July 8th, 2010 by Jodi
The chances are that if you’re having your website designed or relaunched you’ll have heard talk of meta tags. Meta tags are the “behind-the-scenes” labels that are written into the HTML (coding) of your website.
The best way to see a meta tag at work is to look at the very top line of your website browser, where you’ll see the description of your website, which is the meta-title. You don’t need to worry about doing this yourself as a good designer will write your meta title but you can help by suggesting the sort of description and keywords you want to use.
This is also the header that people see when they do a Google search. Too many times this title is wasted with a simple “welcome to” when the title could be utilised to properly describe what your website is all about. A better meta title would be: “The best place to buy scented candles and home perfumes”.
Most experts agree that a meta-title is still important in terms of SEO. The meta-title is used by the search engine spiders to help identify what your site is about and then index it accordingly so people can find it. Every page of your site should have a different meta-title – and they should contain keywords.
Then there’s the Meta Description. This doesn’t appear anywhere on your site itself but is still considered to be important. The meta description is the two lines of text that appear under your meta-title on the search engine results pages. Make sure these are well written both in terms of telling people in a nutshell what your site is about and also with the right keywords.
You can type your own company name into Google to see what meta description your home page has.
To ensure that your meta tags are doing all they should, speak to your web designer or an SEO expert. WebCreationUK offers a specific SEO boosting option.
Tags: google, Meta Tags, Website Design