You’ve heard of them.
What are they and what do they have to do with search engine rankings?
Websites are written in a programming language called HTML. Basically, these are instructions to browsers for how to display a page. HTML is written in the form of “tags” which start with a < and end with a >. For example a “b” enclosed in <> means display the text that comes after in bold.
Metatags are tags which instead of telling the browser how to display the website, provide information ABOUT the website. For example, the title tag says what the title of the page is.
There are many metatags but only a handful of them are of importance. The title tag is one of these, it actually does display on the screen when you view a page – all the way at the very top of the screen.
The description metatag let’s you write a description of the page which will usually be picked up by Google and displayed when the page shows up in a search.
The keywords metatag lets you tell the search engines what the page is about. However, these days, Google and other search engines all but ignore this tag as it is too subject to abuse.
Other metatags tend to be rather technical and of much less importance.