seofrance.co.uk Blog

Meta tags are snippets of code in the head section of your webpage. They include items such as title, description, keywords, rating, language etc.

<title>Title of your web page</title>
<meta name=”Description” content=”Description of the current webpage.” />
<meta name=”Keywords” content=”Keywords relevant to the current webpage” />

These tags are not viewed on your webpage it self, but are used by internet browsers & search engines. The tags explain which language the site is in, the title of the site, a brief description of that particular pages contents, which keywords are relevant to the page etc.

I recently trawled through the code of 30 websites, all in the same market & in the same area. All had errors in the meta tags.

<meta name=”Description content=”Description of the current webpage. />

<meta name=”Description” content=”Description of the current webpage.” >

<meta name=”Description” content=Description of the current webpage. />

All three of these description meta tags are wrong. By having the tags they believed they were getting their sites crawled better by the search engines. But because of the errors they were infact being penalised by the search engines.

So do “meta tags” really matter? Will they help your page rank in the organic listings?

The answer is, yes. But only if the meta tag code is correct. If not you are more likely to cause harm to your page rank & find that your site never appears high in the listings.