The function of meta tags and keywords

Meta tag are codes in the web pages HTML that are decoded by search engines in order to index the domain and allow a good positioning in the results obtained.

Their function is to provide these engines with specific information regarding a particular site. Example of this: meta tags Title, meta tag Description and meta tag Keyword, all of them metadata for SEO optimization.

 

Meta tags Title is the most important because it is the first information that the search spider reads to arm its own catalogue of contents, showing the websites or webpages title. Its content must be univocal, original, discursive and relevant with the topic of the page and its length of eighty characters approximately. The meta tag Description gives the spider a very short description of the site's subjects, its length should not exceed two hundred characters otherwise it will be cut out and will lose effectiveness.

 

The meta tag Keyword is the least important, it provides search engines with a list of keywords contents of the site. It is good to know that you should ideally insert between ten and fifteen words. In addition, terms of spoken language are used to reach a wider audience. Even the names of specific areas or locations affect the searches. All of them will be recalled in the text of the web page. Recent studies have shown that, when the user performs an online search, they generally uses sentences instead of just one word, so the meta tag keyphrases are more effective than meta tag keywords. For this reason we use short key phrases, maximum of three words, present in the web content. However, it is relevant to mention Google because it has publicly stated that it completely ignores meta tag Keywords.

This data, providing information to the search engine, allows you to decide what to highlight, i.e. how to index a site in order to avoid penalisations in its optimisation.