How to use Meta Tags

Meta Tags

What are meta tags?

 They are information inserted into the "head" area of your web pages. Other than the title tag (explained below), information in the head area of your web pages is not seen by those viewing your pages in browsers. Instead, meta information in this area is used to communicate information that a human visitor may not be concerned with. Meta tags, for example, can tell
a browser what "character set" to use or whether a web page has self-rated itself in terms of adult content.

Lets see two common types of meta tags, then we'll discuss exactly how they are used in more depth:

In the example above, you can see the beginning of the page's "head" area as noted by the tag -- it ends at the portion shown as .

Meta tags go in between the "opening" and "closing" HEAD tags. Shown in the example is a TITLE tag, then a META DESCRIPTION tag, then a META KEYWORDS tag.

The Title Tag

The HTML title tag isn't really a meta tag, but it's worth discussing in relation to them. Whatever text you place in the title tag (between the portions as shown in the example) will appear in the reverse bar of someone's browser when they view the web page. For instance, within the title tag of this page that you are reading is this text:

In review, think about the key terms you'd like your page to be found for in crawler-based search engines, then incorporate those terms into your title tag in a short, descriptive fashion. That text will then be used as your title in crawler-based search engines, as well as the title in bookmarks and in browser reverse bars.

The Meta Description Tag

The meta description tag allows you to influence the description of your page in the crawlers that support the tag.

Look back at the example of a meta tag. See the first meta tag shown, the one that says "name=description"? That's the meta description tag. The text you want to be shown as your description goes between the quotation marks after the "content=" portion of the tag (generally, 200 to 250 characters may be indexed, though only a smaller portion of this amount may be displayed).

For this page you are reading, I would like it described in a search engine's listings like this:

This tutorial explains how to use HTML meta tags, with links
to meta tag generators and builders.

Will this happen? Not with every search engine. For example, Google ignores the meta description tag and instead will automatically generate its own description for this page. Others may support it partially.

In review, it is worthwhile to use the meta description tag for your pages, because it gives you some degree of control with various crawlers. An easy way to do this often is to take the first sentence or two of body copy from your web page and use that for the meta description content.


I hope this has helped you understand a bit about meta tags and why we should add them,With submit express as we discussed earlier they have a great meta tag generator and a very simple easy to use tutorial on how to place them into your website.