What’s in a Meta Tag?

For some, the word meta tag means absolutely nothing. For an SEO Specialist at a search engine marketing company, this term is part of my everyday vocabulary. As part of my website optimization, I focus the meta tags on each and every page of a website.

By definition:
met·a·tag n. An HTML tag that contains descriptive information about a webpage and does not appear when the webpage is displayed in a browser.

Meta Tags contain a website’s title, description and keywords along with other coded information. Now even though you cannot see these little gems tucked away in the source code of a website, the search engines can… and they are looking for a few things.

These are a few general meta tag recommendations:

• The title tag should be 5-10 words, including the company name and relevant keywords, 90 characters including spaces
• The description tag should be a concise summary of the page, made up of 170 characters including spaces
• The keyword tag should include keyword phrases and at most 900 characters with spaces

All meta tags should be page specific - meaning each page should have its own title tag, description tag and keyword tag.
Isn’t search engine optimization so exciting?!!

Entry by: jess