What Are Meta Tags?
Meta tags are snippets of text that describe a page’s content; the Meta tags don’t appear on the page itself, but only in the page’s code. We all know tags from blog culture, and Meta tags are more or less the same thing, little content descriptors that help tell search engines what a web page is about.
The only difference between tags you can see (on a blog post, say) and tags you can’t see is location: meta tags only exist in HTML, usually at the “head” of the page, and so are only visible to search engines (and people who know where to look). The “meta” stands for “meta data,” which is the kind of data these tags provide – data about the data on your page.
Do Meta Tags Help SEO?
Yes, they do, but not all of them and not all of the time. One of the goals of this page is to explain which Meta tags help you to get the word out and which have become passé. (See Know Your Meta Tags below).
If you want to find out whether a given page is using Meta tags, just right-click anywhere on the page and select “View Page Source.”
A new tab will open in Chrome (in Firefox, it’ll be a pop-up window). The part at the top, or “head” of the page, is where the Meta tags could be.
Source: Wordstream
