Meta Tags and Other Geeky Stuff

Meta tags are small snippets of code that describe a web pages content. Meta tags appear in the code of the page only, so they aren’t visible on the page itself. Basically, they’re small content descriptors that tell search engines exactly what the page is about.

There are many different meta tags that can be used and while they all have their reasons for being, not all of them will help SEO, and a few just some of the time. Why all the confusion about what to use and when? Spam. That’s why. You see, black hat SEO’s over the years have tried using metadata to game the system and because of that certain tags have been devalued, as far as search engine optimization is concerned.

Why are we telling you all of this? Because it matters. It matters because  meta tags, rather the proper use of meta tags, can be a boon to your website and how it ranks. At 3GEdigital we understand both how to use them and when to use them.

Meta Tag Examples

While there are many different meta tags there are really only for types that you need to know about. They are:

• Meta Keywords Attribute – Keywords that tell what the page is about (lots of debate if these are still relevant)
• Title Tag – Browsers see this as the title of the page and is an important tag.
• Meta Description Attribute – This is a short description of the page. Typically this is the description you see in a search result so it’s importance go beyond just SEO.
• Meta Robots Attribute – These tell search engines what to do with a page and it’s elements such as links.

If those aren’t enough you also have image tags, canonical url tags, author tags and so much more. Then you have rich snippets such as Schema.org that go even deeper with 100’s of different schemas that describe what a page is about. All of this is important.

At 3GEdigital we wade through the noise and optimize each page of your site from the code to the copy.