Toronto SEO


Meta Tags & SEO

Meta tags are the HTML tags which play an important role in optimizing your website to achieve high search engine rankings. A Meta tag is actually an HTML coding which allows you to enter a text which is not visible to the visitors but it is visible to the various search engines.

Meta tags are placed under the <head> area of your webpage i.e. these are placed under the <head> tag. Meta tags are visible only to the search engines and so, Meta tags helps you to get your site indexed more appropriately in the different search engines. The informative text entered inside the Meta tags is not visible to different visitors browsing the website. Meta tags don’t carry the same weightage like title tags, links, content and more but these tags do carry some weight. Some websites don’t even use the Meta tags as it is not necessary to have Meta tags on your webpage in order to rank high but these do help to some extent.

Meta tags are used to communicate the information to the search engines which is not of much importance to the visitors browsing the website. Using Meta tags doesn’t ensure that you will rank high in the search engine results but it provides an alternative to webmasters in order to communicate with the search engines. These can be used to describe the site to the search engines but these tags should not be abused by using a lot of keywords.

Also, there are different Meta tags and some of them are -

Meta Description Tag

The Meta description tag is actually an HTML code which lets you describe your webpage. It gives the idea about the content available on the page and the description is generally displayed on search engine result pages below the title tag and so, the description should be short and informative.

Meta Keywords Tag

You can use this tag to insert your desired keywords as search engines use keywords to search the websites but you should not spam the code. At present, search engines don’t give much weight to this tag but it can still be used to include the keywords. The syntax is-
< meta name=”keywords” content=”Mississauga Web Design, Toronto Search Engine Optimization” />
In the above example, the Mississauga Web Design and Toronto Search Engine Optimization are the keywords which are separated by a comma and are enclosed in the double quotes.

Meta Robots Tag

If you don’t want to index a page available on your site or if you don’t want the search engines to follow links available on a page then you can use Meta robots tag. You can use this tag to communicate with the search engines and to tell them if you want to get the page indexed or not. If you are not using Meta robots tag then by default, search engine spiders will index a page and will also follow the links available on the page.
Various commands used are –

Index : It allows the search engine spiders to index the page.

Noindex : If you don’t want a page to get indexed then you can use noindex as it instructs the search engine spiders not to index the page.

Follow : It instructs the search engine spiders to follow the links available on the page.
Nofollow : It instructs the search engine spiders not to follow the links available on the page.

So, Meta tags are not of that importance when compared with title tags, links, content but they do carry some importance and Meta tag optimization will definitely help you to improve your search engine rankings.
 

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