Meta Tags, Link Popularity, Website Link Exchange

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What are meta tags?

Meta is the Greek word for "over", and the "meta-tags" are information inserted into the "head" area of your web page. Other than the title tag , information in the head area of your web page is not seen by those viewing your site.

Instead, meta information in this area is used to communicate information that a human visitor may not be concerned with. Meta tags, for example, can tell a browser what "character set" to use or whether a web page has self-rated itself in terms of adult content.

There are many meta-tag types, but from the search engines' perspective, the most important are the "keywords" meta-tag (carrying keywords associated with the content of the webpage) and the "description" meta-tag (that provides a brief description of the page).

The first major crawler-based search engines to use the meta keyword tags were Infoseek and AltaVista. Meta keyword tags were constantly abused as people used to spam search engines using misleading meta tags or use excessive repetition of words in hopes of tricking the crawlers about relevancy. For this reason, many search engines stopped using meta keywords to determine the relevancy of the page and concentrate more on meta description tag and other factors.

However, being one of the few techniques capable of helping search engines to "understand" human-produced content, meta-tags are still used by many search engines. It is necessary to stress that no search engine relies heavily on them any more, while some search engines ignore them completely.