Definition

• Meta information refers to added information about something, such as publishing dates on magazine articles or the categorization of a blog post. Meta information is often used to sort or order content and materials, whether they are websites or stock in a warehouse.
  
  

Meta Tags

• In HTML, meta tags allow coders to add meta information to their Web pages. Rather than have a different type of meta tag for each type of meta information, HTML includes just one meta tag with "name" and "content" attributes that take the information. For example, the "name" attribute of a meta tag holding a website's description is "description."
  
  

Meta Description Code

• The code for adding a meta tag with a site description looks like this:
  
  <meta name="description" content="This is my very cool website, so I hope you will visit. We have bears and stuff." />
  
  The above meta tag is formatted in the XHTML style with a forward slash to close off the tag, since meta tags have no matching closing tags. In HTML 4 and HTML 5, this code looks identical but does not need the closing forward slash. Note that you should only use the meta tag for a description once for each Web page, because Google will not read the second one.
  
  

Meta Description Use

• The meta description is what Google uses to display a description of your website when it comes up in the search results, so a good meta description is key to getting good traffic. You can have your website rank at the top of Google, but if the description is boring, fewer people will click on your link. According to Joost de Valk, the programmer behind the "Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin" for WordPress, Google only uses the first 150 words of either your Web page or meta description, so keep your description to 150 or fewer words.
  
  

Meta Tag Placement

• Meta tags should always go below the title tags in the head of an HTML document, with the exception of meta tags specifying character sets or those that use the "http-equiv" attribute. A great example is the "HTML5Boilerplate" code by Paul Irish, a respected Google and jQuery developer. Irish put the meta description and other meta tags lacking browser instructions below the title tags, because the Web page title is the most important piece of information used by the Google crawler.