What is a meta tag
Written by Abhishek Ghosh
There was a time when I didnt know of Meta tags myself. I'm glad I do now as they have really helped me with search engines.
Meta tags, basically tell search engines what your web page is all about. When a search engine starts to index your page it goes through the Meta data of that page like the Meta keywords and Meta description. This helps it in many ways, some of which are -
- Categorizing the webpage.
- Assigning relevance to a webpage corresponding to a keyword or a phrase.
- Eliminating / Resolving duplicates.
You may wonder, If Meta tags really are so important then how come search engines manage pages that do not contain them ?
When you don't put any Meta tags on your web page then the search engines will usually take a snapshot of the most relevant page content and use it as a Meta description for the page.
Not only do Meta tags help in better search engine rankings but also help in increasing click through rates. When you perform a search, you are presented with a result page containing a list of links along with short descriptions. The descriptions you see are coming from their Meta descriptions; Links with extracts from their content are links without any Meta descriptions.
So the next time you create a page , make sure you Meta-describe what it is about !
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