Meta Tags

These tags are an important part of your web site if you want to be recognised by the search engines. Effectively these are `snippets` of information about your page that search engines can pick up.

If your page is about `widgets` then this keyword needs to be found somewhere in the 3 meta tags.

You have 3 important meta`s, these are Title, Description, Keywords. However not all search engines use these 3 tags but they all use the title.

*Remember that the meta tags are not the magic solution to get you to number in a search engine.

Below is an example of a search that can be made in a search engine.

Meta Title

As you can see this Title Tag is shown in the above search in google and is displayed below upon entering the page at the top in the blue if you are using internet explorer. This is the most important as this is visible the human eye. The title tag needs to be short but effective.

Meta Description

This is the part that the human eye does not see but the search engines do. If you right click on the page and select `View Source` you will see the following at the top:

<title>Meta Tags | Title - Description - Keywords and how they work.</title>
<meta name="keywords" content="Meta tags, Tutorial, Title Tags, Description tags, Keyword tags">
<meta name="description" content="Information on how to use the title description and keyword meta tags in simple plain english">

This tag should be longer than the title and you should put a bit more information about the page and its aim.

Meta Keywords

The keywords is a way that you can reinforce your title and description tags by placing relevant keywords in that are seperated by a comma.  In general you would put the most used words in your page like widgets, used widgets, new widgets, buy widgets. 

As you can see this is a introduction to Meta tags and how they work to help the performance of your website.