SEO Frequently Asked Questions

QUESTION: Posted on 12/29/2004 6:16:07 AM
What are meta tags, and do any search engines use them?

ANSWER: Posted on 12/29/2004 10:46:00 AM

Meta tags were originally designed to tell search engines more about your website that is not displayed to the visitors. Meta tags are found by viewing the source code. There are 2 main meta tags used by search engines called the meta description and meta keyword tags.

Unfortunately the meta tags were abused by spammers to get rankings for irrelevant keywords and very few search engines use them anymore to determine ranking.

Meta description: Is still used by a number of search engines to display a summary of the contents of the web page. This tag is still useful on most search engines (except Google) for controlling what your listing in the search engine results page (SERP) say about your website. Google uses a snip-it from the visible text on the website as a description in the SERPs.

Meta Keyword: Was intended to tell the search engines about other relevant keywords that are not included in the visible text. It is sometimes used by smaller search engines. Yahoo has recently announced that they do read keyword meta data and advise you to use the tag. Google doesn't use the tag to determine ranking.