Meta tags are html code that you can insert into your web pages.
Generally speaking they are used by search engines to help index your pages properly.
There is a lot of information freely available on the web about the importance of meta tags and to use them to get a high page ranking. However most of it is out of date and some is just plainly wrong.
Basically there are only two meta tags that you should concern yourself with. These are the Title tag and the Description meta tag.
Both of these tags are definitely used by most of the search engines. They are certainly used by Google and that accounts for a very large proportion of searches on the web these days.
These tags are placed at the top of your html code in the head section as per the example below.
Both of these meta tags are important from an SEO point of view as you will see if you read my two articles Optimizing Title Tags and Optimizing description meta tags
However they are also extremely important in getting people to click and visit your site once the search engines list your page in their search results.
Why?
Your Title tag and your Description meta tag are displayed when you web page is listed by the search engines. Take a look at the example Google search result below.
The top line of the search result is the Title tag. The next line is taken from the Description meta tag.
So now you can see that making the Title and Description tags compelling will help increase the number of clicks you get when you are listed. Please don't fall into the trap of using Title tags like "Home Page"
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