Description: Knowledge of SEO basics is important in making your website more visible to your target viewers, most of whom regularly go to Internet search engines to look for useful content. The meta tags of your website can be optimized for your website to be easily indexed by the search engine robots of Google, Yahoo! and other Web search engines. Here is a brief explanation of meta tags and its importance in properly optimizing your website for the most widely used Internet search engines.
Body: Meta tags are used by browsers to display relevant information of your website to your viewers. These include the title of the page, the description and keywords associated with the content of the page. These details are also used by Internet search engines to easily index a website under relevant keywords and topics.
Internet search engines previously gave a lot of weight to these meta tags. Spammers and other SEO experts began to notice the importance Internet search engines gave to these meta tags. They then tried to dupe the ranking algorithms of the most widely used Internet search engines by stuffing these meta tags with keywords, most of which were unrelated to the content of the page, just to get high search engine rankings for those keywords. The result = Google, Yahoo! and other Internet search engines began to devalue the importance of these meta tags for indexing and ranking.
Google does not give any value to meta keywords, though Yahoo! still does, albeit low importance. Most Internet search engines still give importance to meta titles, since this is also the first line viewers will see when loading and browsing a page.
Meta tags are values between the HEAD HTML tags of a page. Meta titles should be kept at a minimum of 60 characters because most Internet search engines have a 60-character limit for titles.
Meta descriptions should also consist of not more than 160 characters. This is the usual limit of Internet search engines when it comes to meta descriptions. Most Internet search engines do not display meta descriptions in the search results index, at the bottom of the title of the page, since they often use indexed content portions of the actual page. They will however use the meta descriptions when they cannot find suitable content portions to display as the relevant description of a page in their search results index.
Meta keywords should be kept at a bare minimum of ten keywords. Google does not provide any importance to these meta keywords, though Yahoo! and other Internet search engines still do.
These are some of the SEO basics you must keep in mind and implement on the pages of your website. Remember: Try to make each page of your website beneficial, easily navigable and simple to browse by human viewers. Doing this could most likely provide you with better SEO results.
Alex is a freelance technology blogger and journalist. He loves to write articles about SEO or Apple mac products and currently writes a media blog covering everything from mobile phones to Virgin Media Discount Codes .