SEO – Meta Tags

Put very simply, a Meta Tag is a piece of information that is sent to a web browser as part of your page, and which a search engine, when it is scanning your site, can read to try to figure out what your site is about. In the early days of the Web, these were extremely useful as an easy place for the search engine to look. But then people came along. And guess what? People always try to cheat. So the search engine operators found that they could not trust what was placed in the Meta Tags (porn sites would try to make it look like they were quite innocent, in order to get a listing), so they had to think of something else.

Then along came Google. They decided to rate a site based on a completely different set of criteria, so if you want to get on Google, Meta Tags aren’t going to help you, but for the other, older search engines, they still have a place.

There are two main types of Meta Tags, Description and Keywords. The Description Tag for your web page should contain a short description of what the page is about. The Keywords Tag for your web page should contain a list of key words that people might use when they enter a search into a search engine. The idea is that if your key words match what the user typed in to the search engine, your page should be listed.

Even though the Keywords Tag isn’t so important these days, the Description Tag will still be used by Google (and other engines) to display to the user on the search screen when they list your page – once it gets listed.

To make things really easy for you, when you set up a PaxiGo Web Site, all you have to do when editing a page is type some likely key words into the provided areas, click Save, and you are done. We take care of the rest.