Meta-tags are hidden web page description fields which help search engines to categorise your site correctly. They are not nearly as important as they used to be for search engine optimisation, as it quickly became apparent that people were abusing the system by placing popular but irrelevant keywords in these fields. However, they do play a part in your search engine ranking, so they are worth getting right.

Remember that shorter tags are the most effective; usually the first phrase has greater weight than the last one; the title tag is of greater importance than the description and keyword tags.

Nowadays search engines mostly use the text of the content of a page itself to analyse its relevancy and place it in search engine listings, rather than referring to the meta-tags. Therefore your priority should be to write a relevant page first. Then, make your meta-tags relevant to your page. For example, good tags for this page would be:

Title Tag: Search Optimisation: Meta Tags

Description: Meta-tags are hidden web page description fields which help search engines to categorise your site correctly.

Keywords: meta, tag, keyword, description, title

Remember that meta-tags alone are not enough – you need to get lots of incoming links to your site and make sure your content is relevant and keyword-rich.

Author: Natalie Catchpole

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