Meta Tags

In the early days of the internet, Meta Tags were used by search engines to index sites. These tags were contained in the HTML of a given page and the more common meta tags used were 'description' and 'keywords'.

<META NAME="DESCRIPTION"> was usually a short description of the site's content and <META NAME="KEYWORDS"> was a list of keywords most likely to be searched for by someone trying to locate a company's services.

These days, few search engines rely on Meta Tags to index sites because of the irrelevant results they can produce. This is because many site developers used the tags incorrectly, or simply didn't use them at all, or used 'spamming' techniques to trick the search engines. An example of 'spamming' is excessive repetition of keywords.

Some of the more popular methods of indexing today are link popularity, location of keywords in a page, <TITLE> tags, and 'themes'. More, in depth..