How Does Google Use Meta Tags

I see a lot of information circulating these days on how to optimize your website to rank better in the search engines (namely Google). Most of what I have read is somewhat correct, but alot is also 3^rd 4^th hand information. What I want to do today is to is give some 1^st hand information that is directly from a publication produced by “Google Webmaster resources” explaining what they like to see on a site as far as Title and Meta tags go.

First lets define META Tags. Meta Tags are an HTML tag that provides information about the web page. Meta tags may contain information about what the page is about (keywords and description), who wrote the page (Author), when they wrote it and much more. They are placed near the top of your HTML code between The Head Tags. Although these tags are hidden to visitors, robots use them to find out information about your webpage.

The Title Tag – Create unique and accurate titles for your pages

If you have a properly created “Title” tag it will show up in the first line of your google listing on the search results page. (no, I do not mean Number #1 position in google J) This will help get surfers to click on your link in the search engines. (I know from personal experience that I usually click on the link in the search results that appears to have the most relevant title to my search) **A Tip that I will give, that did not come from this Google publication, is that you should give your page the title of the keyword phrase that you were targeting for that page.**

The title for each of the pages of your site should be unique. (Do not give every page of your site the same title)

The Description Tag – The description tag is important because google will possibly use this as the snippet of text that is displayed under your listing, if other suitable text is not found on your web. Once again you should be as descriptive as possible as to what the web page is about so that this will appear relevant to someone using the search engine. (put text here that will draw in your visitor but is still relevant to the page)

The Keyword Tag – Well Google does not even mention the use of the tag in their documentation, so I would conclude as has been suspected by many that they do not use the keyword tag to help index the page. The best way to ensure that your page gets indexed for a particular page is to actually use the keywords or keyword phrase in the content of the page. This is a change from when I first started on the internet as at that time keywords were a big part of how search engines indexed pages.

So having said that, keywords are still important it is just the tag for keywords in the HTML code that is not.

Author and Robots Tag -

The last two areas of the meta tag are Author and Robot tags, For the author you can just put the individuals name that created the article or page, and for robots you cab leave it blank unless you do not want Google to index your page. If you do not want google to index your site then you can just put in “No Follow” this tells the googlebot not to crawl that page. You do not need to add anything extra in this tag to ensure that the robot crawls your site, as this is done by default.

So having said all of the above I hope that I have answered the question on "How does google use meta tags" and I conclude that meta tags are still important, but more for the person surfing rather than the search engine itself which is much different than it was at one time.

If you are interested in more search engine optimzation articles I will be writing more and adding them to the site.

Get more free Information From Jason Rushton delivered to your email.........

SIGN UP FOR FREE BELOW!