Met a tag lately? Give me a description.

Posted by John

November 3, 2007

Web Site Promotion for the Small Business v2
November 3, 2007

What is a META TAG? Here is a definition from webopedia.com:

A special HTML tag that provides information about a Web page. Unlike normal HTML tags, meta tags do not affect how the page is displayed. Instead, they provide information such as who created the page, how often it is updated, what the page is about, and which keywords represent the page's content. Many search engines use this information when building their indices.

There are several META TAGS but this post will only discuss the benefits of the description META TAG.

The description META TAG is used to describe the contents of the page in which is is contained. It is placed in the area after the tag. Search engines use this as a primary place to match a user's keyword search with your page. If what is on the page is properly described in the description META TAG, your page should get a high ranking when a user uses that search criteria. Although Google does not publish it's ranking criteria, there have been people that have run tests against Google to figure this information out. By the way, I highly recommend http://www.searchenginewatch.com/. What they have to say about the description META TAG is here: http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=2167931 www.bigoakinc.com also has an article on this subject.

In the interest of fairness, http://www.highrankings.com/ disagrees with the findings produced by searchenginewatch.com. I suggest you run your own test and decide for yourself.

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