HTML meta tags provide information about a website’s content to search engines. They were once important for search engine optimization, but now primarily help categorize and describe content. Commonly used tags include description, robot, and keywords.
HTML meta tags are inconspicuous pieces of code that run in the background and are typically used to provide information about a website’s content to search engines. Search engine optimization specialists often use meta tags to improve the visibility of a website and to help search engines better rank and describe the website. When a website is submitted to a search engine, the search engine sends a crawler or robot spider to decide whether or not to index the site and, if so, how to rank it in the system. Meta tags help the robot decide where the website should rank, how it should be described, and in some cases, how it will rank in search results.
The use of HTML meta tags was once considered an important part of search engine optimization. With the widespread abuse of meta tags, however, many search engines have begun to focus more on visible factors, such as written text and external links, to help determine page rank. HTML meta tags are now primarily used to help categorize and describe a website’s content, and many meta tags are discouraged from being used because they often go unnoticed by search engine bots.
While there are many HTML meta tags available, only a few are widely recognized and commonly used. For example, many people use the description tag to attract potential viewers. In some search engines, this tag will often appear in search results to help quickly describe what can be found within the website. Some search engines may use a 200 to 250 word description in its entirety, others may show only a partial description in search results, and still others may ignore the description tag entirely and choose to create their own short description instead.
Two other commonly used HTML meta tags are robot tags and keywords. The robot tag is recognized by most major search engines and is used to help the website builder specify which pages should be indexed. Keyword tags aren’t as widely recognized, as they are often overused. In most cases, they are best used to reinforce the prominence of certain keywords that already appear in the body of a website. This type of tag can also be useful in helping a search engine identify variations in the spelling of certain words or phrases.
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