What are meta tags?
Meta tag is a word which h originally means data about data. As far as search engine optimization is concerned it is the part which gives additional information about the web-page to the web-crawler or search engine spiders. Though these are not mandatory but if provided search engines can interpret and understand the web-page in a much more conveniently.
Where does Meta tag go?
In the HTML file of your website the meta tag goes inside the <head> and </head> tags. However there have been a lot of debate about the importance and significance of meta tags after the introduction of Google’s new ranking algorithm Google Panda still we can say that it is not completely dead and it has still retained some importance and significance.
Meta tags are used for various fields in the HTML document like page title, page description and page keywords which not only segregate the overall document but also to control where, how and when a robot should crawl and index your web-page.
How to write effective page description tags:
Writing meta description tags are not considered as important as they were initially still it will reap you great benefits in long run. Just like defining and writing the title of your web-page needs a fair blending of creative and technical skills here also we need a fair blending of creative and technical approach to get the most out of your Meta tag description. The main goal of your meta tag description would be not only to insert keywords in the meta tag description but also to make it more creative and intuitive so that search engine can display it conveniently and in an appealing manner.
A good example of a meta tag would be like this:
<meta name= “description” content= “reviews and ratings of i-pad”>
When we talk about the technical part of the meta tag description it involves including your keywords in the meta description of your document. Like
<meta name= “description” content= “apple i-pad reviews & ratings”>
However the creative part of the meta tag description writing the meta description in a much more attractive and appealing way along with maintaining the keyword density of the words used in the meta description. Like
<meta name= “description” content = “apple i-pad review-unbiased expert advice on which apple i-pad is the best for you”>
While working on various content management platforms like WordPress, Joomla or Drupal they provide a dialog box that is user-friendly where user can enter their page description and then the software will automatically give you the Meta tag description for that particular page.
While writing Meta description for your documents webmasters should note that the word length of the meta description should not be too long otherwise it will be truncated anyway by search engines while displaying it on the search engine result page.