What are meta tags?

I belong to a mastermind group that is following a Joel Comm video series. We get together every week and discuss the particular session we watched during that week. Some of his videos do assume a certain amount of knowledge especially when they veer off the prepared materials.

The discussion was concerning meta tags and how important (or unimportant) they are for SEO. I was glad I watched because I picked up one interesting tidbit about meta tags that I hadn’t known before .. but I’ll get to that in another post.

So what are meta tags?

First off, it’s useful to understand that what you see on a web page isn’t the whole story, there are certain HTML code elements that are not visible on the rendered page but still read by search engines. Meta tags fall into this category. Meta tags are metadata, essentially data about data (if that is confusing, I’m afraid the wikipedia entry won’t be much help). However in this specific example, the concept is a little easier to grasp, since on an HTML web page, meta tags help describe what the web page is about.

What can you say about a web page? Well a number of things, but you need to only pay attention to two tags “description” and “keywords”.

• Keywords is just that, a list of keywords that you think describe your page the best
• Description is a few sentences that describes what your page is about

Many website building tools and CMS (content management systems) will have some way for you to fill these tags in, without having to learn how to code them into HTML. If they don’t, consider moving on to one that does.

Next – how search engines use meta tags

Firefox and IE and tag conflicts

I have been doing some customization to the wordpress theme I have using for this blog.  The original theme was too mono-colored and the link color was hard to see.  And of course I wanted my own header.

Many blog themes put the title of your blog both as the page title tag and also as a H1 somewhere as text in your header.  This was fine with me but I wanted to have it display in a smaller font size to be more compatible with my custom header and not overrun my graphic.

So I went into the css of the blog theme and found the id tag (called “h1″) that specified the size in “em” and picked a smaller size.

It looked great on firefox, but on IE7 the size was unchanged.   Furthermore I had also changed the link color from a barely distinguishable grey to a dark red with a command to underline the link on hover.   Again worked great on Firefox 3, totally ignored on IE7.

With some help from my webdesigner friend from talksure, we figured out the problem.   For the blog title, the theme not only enclosed the text in a div tag specifying the id “h1″, but it also had additionally enclosed the text in h1 tags (confusing .. but they *are* different).   Of course the css had a larger size specified for the h1 tag. What was happenning was Firefox gave the div tags priority .. but IE7 gave the regular h1 tags priority.

A similiar problem explained the link color problem.

If you have conflicting tags, the behavior by IE and Firefox is likely to be different.

We think the reason that the title was enclosed in both a div tag and a h1 tag was to give the search engines a recognizable H1.  And it makes sense this would be the blog title.  However for now, the H1’s are removed so that my blog looks the same on all browsers.