All that you wanted to know about Meta Tags
SEO is in boom, so is html. To understand the formula of SEO one needs to understand the basics of html. The hundreds of web pages you go through daily on internet are written in html (hyper text markup language). These html documents include <head> element which contains <title> tag as mandatory component. Similarly Meta tags are basically tags written inside <head> element, comes under optional category. If not you, search engine will write description about your web-page in its own version, but it’s not preferable as it takes any random garbage data to describe your page. Here is all that you wanted to know about Meta Tags.
Meta tags are supported in most of all browsers like internet explorer, Google chrome, Opera, Firefox, safari etc. Meta tags decide its visibility and existence on certain grounds like, the way how content is displayed or how the page is getting reloaded etc. Along with other elements Meta tags are also used by search engines and other web services. The content written inside <Meta> tag is known as meta data. Meta data will not be displayed on the page i.e. not directly visible to user visiting the web-page, it explains the page to a browser; it is secret language which only a webmaster can understand. Webmasters include Meta data to provide search engines with information about their sites.
It’s a misconception that Meta tags help improving ranking in search engine results. Yes it is a part of large algorithm used by any search engine but it’s not the only factor search engines look for! Earlier, in the mid to late 1990s search engines were dependent on Meta data to correctly classify a Web page and webmasters quickly learned the commercial significance of it and used the same for giving websites higher ranks. But today their effect has significantly reduced as search engine algorithms have become more sophisticated. So, just adding Meta tags won’t take your site to the top most position in ranking.
The reason why search engines stopped using Meta data for their results is ‘keyword spamming’. Spamming basically means manipulating search engine results. SEO (search engine optimization) is the process where different methods are used to provide higher ranking to sites. But there are people who use unethical methods to make websites rank higher referred as ‘black hat SEO’. In content spam, the logical view of a search engine over the page’s contents is altered. Meta tag stuffing was one of the methods of content spam, which involves using Meta keywords that are not at all related to the site’s content and repeating keywords in the Meta tags. This strategy is being solved since 2005 so, consumers of such SEO services should be very careful while hiring the personnel and should employ only reputed providers.
Coming to meta tags, since it takes very less time to add and they still play little role in helping your site get found in search engines, we can’t completely remove meta tags from html documents. Proper use of Meta tags will definitely help you. Go for it!
