META Tags - What are they?
META Tags are an important part of SEO. They are used to define numerous parts of a web page, whether it be keywords, the description or the title. All of these help from an SEO perspective, yet META Tags have been widely misused in recent years.
History of META Tags
META Tags were originally created to provide a more sufficient indexing system, this helped crawlers index more relevant and quality websites for the users of the search engines. There was once a time when you could fill the META Tags with numerous keywords and rank at position one in a SERP (search engine results page). Nowadays that is considered to be keyword spamming and is usually dealt with by a penalty or ban by the search engine companies.
What exactly do they do?
META Tags are pieces of code that contain vital information for search engine crawlers. They are inserted into the <head> of the HTML document and must not be placed outside of the </head> Tag. This information helps search engines index a website much like we have numbers in a library system. Making websites easier to crawl suits everyone as the crawlers have more time to crawl more pages and they do not necessarily have to crawl the whole page.
What do META Tags look like?
Anything that is enclosed between the <head> and </head> Tag is considered to be a META Tag. Yet, not all META Tags look the same.
A Keyword META Tag looks like:
<meta name=”keywords” content=”keyword 1, keyword 2, keyword 3″>
A Title META Tag looks like:
<title>Insert text to be displayed as title here</title>
There are obvious differences between the two tags, but both do the same thing. They define data that can be used by the search engine crawlers.
Summary
Many people believe that the weightings given to META Tags these days aren’t sufficient enough to have an impact on rankings. At Position Gold we believe everything is taken into account, and META Tags are just one part of many factors considered when calculating rankings.
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