A Couple Of The Less Known Meta Tags
Wednesday, September 30th, 2009
A Couple Of The Less Known Meta Tags
A meta tag is something used by the search engines to find out information about your website, such as the description, geographical location and keywords. Meta tags are used to help webmasters optimize there websites for the search engines and held a lot of weight several years back, but every year google makes around 200 tweaks and 1-2 major updates which have given less weight to meta tags which doesn't mean they shouldn't be used.
The first meta tag which I am going to talk about does hold a small amount of weight and get help you rank slightly better in your chosen regional search engine. The tag is called a meta geo tag and allows you to specify the location of your website making it easier for google to work out where to display your content and in which search engine, for example google.co.uk is for uk residents where as google.fr is for French residents. You can also confirm in google webmaster tools which country or countries you would like to targeted your website at.
The second tag which seems to get a lot of searches is called the meta refresh tag and can be read by the search engines as well as your web browser. The meta refresh tag is quite self explanatory as all it does is refresh the content on a particular page after a set amount of time, you can also tweak the meta refresh tag to redirect the user to another page after a set time but that is considered bad seo so I strongly recommend not using it. Everything you do to your website should be 100% search engine friendly, make sure you do research on tags you are using for the first time or tags you haven't used for a while.
Other than that you should already know about the meta description and meta keyword tags as they are the most popular and still hold some positive weight with google. The meta description tag is used less by google now days because google is capable of writing its own description about your page if it feels the meta description isn’t relevant enough.
