How do META Tags Help?

META Tags will never guarantee you a top position in crawler-based search engines like Google, but they will help with how your site is displayed in the results pages. Many will claim META tags have had their day, however their presence if used correctly will help you get better placements in some search engines.

Using META Tags

There are many META tags but the main ones that will affect general search engine placements are:

• TITLE tag - this tag is crucial for all search engines
• META Description tag - this tag enjoys much support, and it is well worth using
• META Keywords tag - this tag is only supported by some major crawlers
• META Robots tag - this tag enjoys full search engines support
• META "Anything else" tags - ignored by the major crawlers, though they may be used by specialized search engines

The TITLE Tag

This not strictly a META tag but rather a HTML tag but its included within this section because of its importance to both human users and search engines alike.

Anything you place between the "<TITLE>" and "</TITLE>" tags will appear in the reverse bar of someone's browser when they view the web page. The title of this page is META tags and how to use them | Webcritique.org & how it is displayed is shown below.

The TITLE tag is also used as the words to describe your page when someone adds it to their "Favourites" or "Bookmarks" lists. For instance, if you added this page to your Favourites in Avant browser, it would show up like this:

The text you use in the TITLE tag is one of the most important factors in how a search engine may decide to rank your web page. In addition, all (search engine) major crawlers will use the text of your title tag as the text they use for the title of your page in your listings.

For example, this is how Google lists the index page of Priday Design Studio:

The test shown below the "headline" in the above example is the META Description tag, which is discussed in the next page.

In conclusion, failing to have accurate and relevant TITLE tags on every page in your site will harm you - as you are seen by humans and even more importantly, by search engines!