Meta Tags are HTML code elements that provide structured information about an individual webpage or website. These snippets of code are not generally viewed by your sites visitors, but they can be. The meta elements are primarily used to provide information that is relevant to browsers or search engines like describing the content of your document.

• Rule #1: META tags always go in between the HEAD tags on your website.
• Rule #2: NEVER include any line breaks in any META tag!

The most basic types of Meta elements are the keyword and description elements.

You keywords element should include the keywords that are most related to the page of the site your users are viewing. The Keywords should be in a descending order of importance with your most important keywords listed first. Keep the list short and do not include more that 25 keywords on a page.

The Description element should include a simple description of the content on the page your users are currently viewing. Descriptions should be kept short and succinct. The maximum number of characters in your description should be 125 characters. Make sure you use a few important keywords in your description. The keywords included in your Description element might include the most important keywords from the Keywords element.

The Meta tags for your keywords and description will look like those shown below.

<meta name=”keywords” content=”boston web design, email marketing, web hosting”>
<meta name=”description” content=”Agency3 is a Boston Web Design Company”>

You may also include additional descriptive elements like:

<meta name=”author” content=”Agency3″>
<meta name=”copyright” content=”Copyright 2008, Agency3″>

These elements tell the browser and search engines who created the web page and provide copyright information for the page.

For search engines, you may want to add this element:

<meta name=”robots” content=”index,follow,noarchive”>

This tells the search engines that visit your site to index the content on the page, follow the links included on the page and tell the search engine not to store a copy of your page in it’s cache.

There are a number of additional Meta elements that can be included on your website, but the tags above include the most commonly used elements. If you have questions about a specific element post a comment below.

Tags: meta elements, Search Engine Optimization