Meta tags
Posted on | August 22, 2010 | Comments Off
If you want your website to feature more prominently in internet search engine results pages (SERPs), a cursory look at the internet will offer plenty advice about meta tags. As is the case with any advice you glean from the web, it’s to be taken with caution and you may want to seek reputable search engine optimization services to be sure.
For a start, what is a meta tag? It allows the page’s owner to declare its keywords and signify what the content of the page is. For example, a page about the Lord Mayor of London may include ‘Mayor of London’, ‘London Mayor’ and ‘London mayoral election’ as meta tags. They can also ensure that web crawlers don’t get confused when determining the content of your page if some keywords have more than one meaning.
The temptations of meta tags
For unscrupulous types, meta tags come with great temptation. It’s pretty easy to stuff your meta tags with keywords that don’t relate to the page content at all. This would have the effect of pushing your site further up the SERPs, albeit on the back of unrelated search queries. However, as any search engine optimization services worth their salt will agree, this can be fraught with drawbacks.
For a start, it’s a waste of time and resources as search engines will ignore your meta tags after a certain number. Your code to content ratio will be reduced and you may even be penalized by a search engine and be removed from its results altogether.