Meta tags.
What am I talking about?
These little snippets of code help promote and properly display your website in the search engines. Without meta description, your website will have a random sentence from your website placed with your site address when someone searches and comes across your site.
For example, my friend's website doesn't have any meta tags, and when I searched blind bay furnishings, this is the description that came with his web address: 'We also offer a range of tents and tipi's with or with out furnishings to create your own decadent western retreat. The shop can add to this with a wide range of ...'
Yes, he does indeed make tents and tipi's but his main work is furniture and if I am looking for hand made furniture, do you think I'll be tempted to open up this website? Not particularly, because I'm not interested in tipi's right now and this site only talks about them in their description.
This description can be found half way down the front of the home page, and there are worse descriptions out there than my friends web site has, but this is what the search indexing bots found for a description because he didn't provide one in a meta tag.
Meta description is important, and so is meta keywords. Without keywords, your website won't likely place as high in the rankings of searches. Actually, even with keywords, your site may not place high (and that's a whole other subject), but keywords are a definite help and tweaking them once in a while to improve your site's search placement is highly recommended. Meta keywords are very important. There's almost a science behind keywords. A person can hire a business who specializes in finding key keywords or a person can brainstorm with family and friends to come up with a variety of words that relate to their business and provide their web designer with them to be added into the code.
There are other meta tags that should be in the header of your website but these two are by far the most important.
How do you know if you have meta tags in your code? If you had a professional design your website, chances are, they are in the code, but ask that person or business if the meta tags are in place and if so, what keywords were used? You might have a few more that could be added into the code that you feel are important.
If the website was designed by someone who used a template, chances are that the meta tags are missing. Templates are just that, a template. A few tweakings here and there and the person has your website placed together. I'm not knocking templates, I think they are a great polished look, also ably to be quickly put together for immediacy. But with quickly put together websites comes with potentially glossed over code and that can leave you low in the search pages.
If you wish to see for yourself whether you have your meta tags in place, open up your main page on your browser. left click the view tab and click the source or page source. It will open up your code. At the top part of your code there should be a head tag. Even if you can't find the head tag due to cluttered code writing, you still should be able to see something like this somewhere close to the top of your code writing:
meta name="description" content="This is where the description for your website would go."
meta name="keywords" content="this is where your words would go relating to your website, these words help the world find your website during their search "
Now there are lots of other meta tags a person could add, but these are by far, two important ones. If you're uncertain whether you have meta tags and wish for me to have a look, leave your website below in the comment field and I'll have a look for you.
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