Meta Tags and Search Engine Optimization

When it comes to cosmetic surgery marketing on the Internet, the search engines can be your greatest ally. In fact, most of the visitors to your site will likely find you after conducting a search in the search engines. There are many different elements which make up good search engine optimization, one of which is the use of Meta tags.

You may have heard of Meta tags before, but what exactly are they? Meta tags are HTML tags which provide visitors and search engines with information about the content of a web page. Targeted keywords can be included in Meta tags to boost search engine rankings since most search engines include meta tags as part of their raking algorithm. Further, Meta tags allow visitors to know what a page is about and can encourage them to click on your site. As useful as Meta tags are, it’s estimated that three out of four website don’t even have them. You can use this statistic to your advantage by optimizing your Meta tags to give you an advantage over all those sites not using them.

There are many different types of Meta tags. The DTD (Document Type Definition) tag is typically the first element used on a page and it precedes the opening tag. The DTD tag distinguishes the particular version of HTML used from other HTML. It lets the browser know what tags can be expected in the layout of the page.

There are also Meta tags for document identification. These include tags requiring the CONTENT attribute and either the NAME or HTTP-EQUIV attribute, which define general information in the document and the value of that information. HTTP-EQUIV attributes are similar to HTTP headers which give browsers useful information for displaying a page. The language Meta tag is an example of the HTTP-EQUIV attribute which, though an optional tag, displays the natural language of the document. The Content-type tag, also an optional tag, refers to the media type, and the Expires Meta tag indicates when a file is considered expired in cache. The Refresh Meta tag, another optional tag, is used to redirect or refresh users to another web page after so many seconds. There are several HTTP-NAME attributes, including the Keyword Tag, which lists targeted keywords on a page, and the Description Tag, which is what is displayed in the results page for many search engines.