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 Meta‑  tags. 

 Meta‑  tags

 are part of the HTML source file, typed in by web page creators, 

which is read by the search engine spider or robot. They are effectively hidden from 

users, but are used by some search engines when robots or spiders compile their index. 

In the past, search engines assigned more relevance to a site containing keyphrases in 

its  meta-  tags than one that didn’t. Search engine spamming of  meta-  tags resulted in 

this being an inaccurate method of assessing relevance and Google has reported that 

it assigns no relevance to  meta-  tags. However, other search engines such as ‘Yahoo! 

Search’ do assign some relevance to  meta-  tags, so it is best practice to incorporate these 

and to change them for each page with distinct content. There are two important  meta- 

 tags which are specified at the top of an HTML page using the   

HTML keyword:

(i)  The ‘keywords’  meta‑  tag highlights the key topics covered on a web page. Example: 

(ii)  The ‘description’  meta-  tag denotes the information which will be displayed in the 

search results page so is very important to describe what the website offers to encour-

age searchers to click through to the site.

Example: marketing – DaveChaffey.com”>.