Meta Tag Tutor

Hello there! My name is Joe and I'm going to teach you a little about meta tags.

What are meta tags?

Meta tags are bits of extra information that you can add to your web pages. This information can range from the more popular keywords and description to the more mundane robots and copyright.

I heard meta tags will help my page rank in search engines.

Yes and no. Actually, more no than yes. In the earlier days of the Internet keywords were very important to early search engines. As the web grew and more people tried to get noticed, the keyword system got a little abused. Most search engines started using other criteria as well in their ranking system. In most search engines, keywords play a part, but not a huge part when determining relevance.

What we'll do is make sure you have solid keywords and description meta tags so at least you're covered in that area. We'll also discuss a couple other things that you can do to help your ranking in search engines. No guarantees though. I realize there are those that promise the world when it comes to search engine rankings, but I don't want to give you any false hopes... there is no golden key to a magic kingdom.

There are two types of meta tags... name and http-equiv. In the next section we'll dig into some name type meta tags.