A good number of people who are new to search engine optimization are often lost when they hear the term Meta tag used regularly in search engine optimization. While Meta tag is a common phrase that is used in search engine optimization it is not too technical to understand the meaning of this term and the role that they play in the process of optimization.

What is a Meta Tag?

This is a term used to refer to a header tag that provides supporting information about a webpage and also interacts with the web server. Basically the tags provide information to search engines on the content of the pages. Meta tags are alternatively uses the http-equiv attributes. The http-equiv tag contains names or value pairs. These are passed to the browser before the document is read by the browser. They are very important in the process of search engine optimization and they should always be check to see that they satisfy the required standards.

Parts of a Meta Tag

Http-equiv Attribute
The definition of this attribute can be said to be a name or value pair that is in found in the MIME document and is always passed to the browser before your page is sent.
Examples of the Meta tag include Charset which identifies the character set in a page, expires that defines when the document will be outdated, refresh that determines the number of seconds that will elapse when you reload a page or open the page to a new page.

Content

This is not found in all Meta tags but those that are well written. Basically it provides the information of the name or value pair.

Name

This is where the name applies and you may use any relevant name to the website. It is therefore the most important part of SEO since you should incorporate the Keywords that are related to the website in this portion of the Meta tag. It also contains a short description, robots, author and copyright. The robots either give permission for indexing by robots or deny. The term "noindex" is used in the case where the robots are not allowed to index a certain web page.

Making Use of Meta Tags in Search Engine Optimization

In getting the best out of these tags as far as optimization is concern is by making use of the tag description by placing the necessary keywords in the description. By putting the keywords in this title description you allow the search engines to categorize your website and therefore improve your ranking. The keywords should be used in a way that they are clear and specific to the theme of the website.

In the past the these tags have been very instrumental in SEO and ranking of the websites since search engines were solely reliant on the them to provide them with the information of a given web page. In today's world they are less significant as the technology of search engine has been development further, however this does not mean that you should not put the SEO relevant descriptions in the these tags. You should always strive to be fully SEO compliant in the structure of the site, design and content.
By Dominic Payne