Utility of Meta Tag
Meta tags are little lines of code that are placed between the <HEAD> and the </HEAD> tags in your site's HTML code. They are designed to give search engines instructions on what your page is about and
how they should treat it. These tags are not displayed to humans visiting your site, but they can be used to influence the way your site appears in the search results.
There are several meta tags that you can add to your pages, but in my opinion the only useful ones are the keywords tag, the description tag and the robots tag. Most others, like the author or distribution tags are not used by the search engines, and I don't recommend using them - you don't want to clutter the top part of your page with useless things, as it can have a negative impact on your ranking.
Let's take a look at the most important meta tags:
Meta tags: The description tag
<META name="description" content="A search engine shows the content of this tag below the title of your site when it appears in the results.">
This tag is very important, since you can use it to encourage people to click on your listing when you are found in a search engine. When your page comes up in the search results, the contents of your META description tag are displayed right below the title of your page. If no description tag is found, the search engine attempts to create a description for you and often fails to describe your page properly.
It's worthwhile to pay some attention to fine-tuning the META description tags you use on your pages. The main reason why you should
do so is that the two things that determine whether you'll get people to click on your listing or not are this tag and the title of your page. If you're going to work hard enough to grab a position in the first page of results, you wouldn't want visitors not clicking on your listing just because it looks uninteresting, now would you?
Make your description meta tags short but informative - if you can trim them to less than 13 words and you feel that they can still give enough information to make the user visit your site, you've done well. If your description tag is over 13 words, try to think how you could reduce the amount of words and still say what you want to say.
Why should your description meta tags be so short? Well, usually the search engine only displays a small part of it in the results list, and if the tag contains too many words, the "extra" words are cut off. So a description like:
"Mike's homepage! If you visit my site, you'll find a huge amount of information about my favorite food, hot dogs!"
Can look like:
"Mike's homepage! If you visit my site, you'll find a huge amount..."
If the user is looking for information about hot dogs, he probably won't visit Mike's site even if it has a high ranking on the result list, because the user doesn't see that it's contains a huge amount of information about hot dogs. For this reason, try to place the relevant stuff near the beginning of the description and the blabber to the end (or just cut the latter right off). If Mike used
"Information on hot dogs, my favorite food. If you'll visit my site, called 'Mike's homepage', you'll find a huge amount of interesting stuff related to them."
as his description, he'd be better off than in the first example. He'd still have a description that is too long, but if the search engine decided to cut it, people would still see it as relevant to hot dogs from the first four words and visit. It would be even better if Mike could just lose the uninteresting stuff after the first sentence, since this would raise the weight of the phrase 'hot dogs' in his tag, earning a (very small) boost in his ranking from the search engine.
Notice that of the major search engines, Google (supplies secondary results to Yahoo's search) doesn't support the description tag.
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