What are meta tags? You may have heard people mention them before, but you don’t really know what they are or what they do. This article will attempt to help you to understand the importance of meta tags, and their uses in search engine optimisation.

Lets start with a definition of what a basic meta tag is. A meta tag is a line of code on a website that shows certain information to the people who are looking at the page, and also to search engines that are trying to put the page in the correct place.

When looking at Search Engine Optimisation, the most important meta tag is :-

<meta name=”description” content=”A blurb to describe the content of the page appears here” />

An example of this that you might find on a website would be

<meta name=”description” content=” A Blogs plumbing offer a range of plumbing solutions in London and surrounding areas”/>

This information here would be visible when you search for a site in the SERP (search engine result positions).

If you typed “Air conditioning” into a search engine. Here’s an example of what you would see

The middle part here is the meta description. This short description shows what the company does, and what products they offer. Information like this makes it easy for search engine users to decide if they have found the site that they are looking for, as well as indicating to the search engine what the contents of the site are.

Other meta tags are also often incorporated into websites, giving the search engine different information. Examples of this can be :-

<meta name=”distribution” content=”Global” />
Shows the search engine that the site is to be available to anyone in the world to view.

<meta name=”rating” content=”Safe For Kids” />
The content in this site does not contain adult information.

<meta name=”author” content=”Creare Communications ” />
The author of the page is the company mentioned.

If you want any more information regarding meta tags, simply drop us a comment.