Metatags

What are they - they sound like something mathematical or far out beyond the confines of the average IQ ! In fact they are a very simple concept - metatags are 1 liner codes that go at the top of a web page and tell the reader (including search engines) what the page is about.

Why I use them - I made the mistake when i first started creating web sites of creating just content - what you see on the page but without meta tags you have little chance of getting ranked well on many of the search engines . So to make search engine visitors at Google MSN Ask etc. find your site listed in their search results , and then visit and buy your products you will need to include these simple lines of code on each page.

There are 3 main metags , the title , description and keywords, that are almost mandatory to get anywhere in the organic search results (organic is a term used to describe the free section of the search engine results as opposed to the PPC pay per click section which is ranked according to a bid price and usually displayed at the top or alongside the organic results)

If you look at the source code of this page (usually right click and choose "view source") you will see what we have entered in the Metatags for this page , the title goes in the title section at the top of the browser window to let your human visitor no a bit about the page they are viewing, the description usually gets added to the description part of the organic listing and should not be too long or short . Keywords are single words or phrases that are the main points of the content on your page .

All sites I create are so called 'search engine friendly' , ie: they include metatags , these do not guarantee any ranking but are well worth including so i always do as a rule of thumb include them.

Other Weird And Wonderful Meta tags :

You can exclude "robots" from crawling your pages / redirecting visitors to another page . These i rarely use . More indepth knowledge for web Gurus can be found at Wikipedia