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What is a meta tag?

People talk about how you can add keywords to your page or define the keywords you want people to enter and find your page, generaly this i what they are refering to.

Unfortunately, the meta tag is a thing of the past. It was an honor system, allowing you to tell the search engine what your page was about. If you sold cars, you could put in words like "used cars, new cars, honda, toyota, ford, chevy..." and so on.

Of course like every honor system, you encounter cheaters, people that put in words that did not accurately reflect their product. Such as the chevy dealer trying to get people looking for fords and putting ford in their meta tags.

In the early days of the internet, it seemed like anything goes and the attempts to get traffic stopped at nothing. There were no rules, there was now law and the criminals ran free as if it was the ols western USA in the 1800's.

But as time went on, the search engines realized that the results were less relavent and could not trust people to rank their own websites.

Now the tags are seen as an attempt to spam (or influence in a less than positive manner) the search results. They see this as an attempt to tell them what your site is about, regardless of what may be on the pages.

The search engines will check the words in the meta tag, if one is present, against the rest of the website's content. If they do not find consistancy, the website is removed from indexing. That is a heavy penalty for using meta tags incorrectly.

Now the search engines base the raning on many paramaters, but one of them is not meta tags. Some searches do display the meta tag as part of the result. Not so much as part of the rank, but rather as a method to teach spammers a lesson and show potential visitors what the spammer is claiming to have on the website even though it is not relavent to the search results.

Our opinion: don't use meta tags. They wont help you, and can only hurt you in the long run.