So what are meta tags and how do they work? Meta tags give alot of information about your website without affecting how your website is displayed. They provide information such as what the page is about, how often it is updated, when it was created and the keywords that represent the pages content.

The two meta tags that are a must are the description and keywords meta tags. The description meta tag gives search engines a description of the page content. A few short sentences should do the trick, however you can add the author of the page and maybe the website slogan. This page has a description meta tag that looks like this:

<meta name="description" content="What meta tags are and how they work, tips, tricks and examples.">

I tend to keep them short and simple but you can add as much as you would like without going overboard. Make sure you use keywords about the page while keeping it in sentence format. Remember, we have another meta tag for keywords. The keywords meta tag will help search engines get an idea as to what the page is all about. You should know that these keywords are just to help, most search engines nowadays have their own way of figuring out what a pages content is. These keywords are listed in comma-space form like this:

<meta name="keywords" content="meta tags, keywords, html, tips, tricks, examples"/>

A good way to determine the keywords of a page is to create it first and and then read it back to yourself. The words that you have written over and over again are most likely the words you want to use as keywords.

You also don't want to go overboard with this. Search engines like Google don't like to many keywords and they don't like repeats, and NEVER add irrelevant keywords. This is an example of what NOT to do:

<meta name="keywords" content="meta tags, meta, tags, keywords, key, words, html, xml, php, tips, tricks, examples, new york giants, new, york, giants"/>

The words in red are repeats and the words in green are irrelevant. Don't use the same words twice even if you are breaking them apart, "meta tags, meta, tags" is a perfect example of that. The best way to figure out which format something should be in is to think of how you would search it. If I'm looking for "best examples of meta tags" I'm not going to search "best meta examples of tags" right? When people search for "meta tags" the two words will always be next to each other so breaking them apart (...meta, tags,..) is unnecessary.

So now you know what the two most important meta tags are and how to use them. Now we can move on to the not-so-important meta tags (but they can still be useful).

For the next part of this article: A full list of meta tags and what they do; Click here.