Meta tags are like bell-bottoms and mullets—they go out of style, and then they come back, over and over again. They also engender a love/hate relationship.

What the Heck are Meta Tags?

Meta tags are HTML tags that usually aren’t displayed but are designed to give the web browser or search engine more information. In the early days of the web, they were all the rage until the creators of web pages abused them and search engines began ignoring, or even penalizing, the use of meta tags.

Show Me a Meta Tag

There are lots of different meta tags, but here are some of the basics:

Author

This meta tag tells the world who the author of the page is. This tag doesn’t ever get penalized by search engines and is useful for claiming ownership of your pages.

Content Type

The content type meta tag determines which character set your page will use—this is important to make sure your characters are decoded the right way and that you don’t end up with a big mess of nonsense.

Description

This meta tag describes your page. You’ll want to keep this somewhat succinct, say no more than 256 characters. The description meta tag is one of the tags that was ignored or penalized by search engines, so you’ll want to make sure you use complete sentences and keep your description from being “spammy.”

Keywords

The keywords meta tag is the most abused meta tag of them all. People would stuff their keywords meta tag with hundreds of keywords, repeating the same words over and over and including words that had nothing to do with the content of the page. Search engines wised up, and you will get nailed if you do things like that. This doesn’t mean, however, that you should abandon this tag. Just write the keywords after you have made the rest of the page and include words that actually appear in the text of your page’s body.

There Are Still Reasons to Use Meta Tags

Not all search engines have abandoned or punished meta tags. Some may still use your keywords to determine what your page is about. Most importantly of all, your meta description is often what shows up as the description a search engine offers in its results. Try this query for Diamond Lime and compare the description to the meta description of the home page:

Your pages will work better and rank better if you make judicious use of meta tags.