CT Biz Blogs

Meta tags are part of the HTML code on a web page. They allow web developers to include “metadata,” or information about the data on a page, right into the page itself. Readers won’t see the metadata, search engine crawlers will.

One type of metadata you can have is keywords. This essentially creates a list of keywords about the page, supposedly for the convenience of search engines. However, it’s been abused for a long time by spammers, and so is useless today.

Abuse of keywords happens when spammers just put in long lists of words, often repeating the same word over and over, in an effort to game the system. Search engines have figured this out.

Some web developers put keyword metadata in the code, anyway, on the principle that it can’t hurt, if done non-abusively. But from everything I’ve read, it’s not used by most search engines. However, if you are using a blog inside a company, there still may be a use for the keyword meta tag.

And, there is still some useful metadata, such as the meta tag “description.” From what I’ve seen, this isn’t abused, so it’s a good way of adding additional information about your site. for example, here’s a screen shot of the description I added to my site. You’ll need to know how to tweak the template, if you want to do this.

Search Engine Watch has an excellent article on meta tags, including examples.

There’s another article with an even more techy explanation of meta tags at Builder.com.