Where do I find the meta tags on a website?

Meta tags are the hidden codes on a website that gives instruction to search engine spider robots on the contents of the page and various bits of information, for example, the language, the title, the important key words, a description, whether the robots should visit the page or not and a whole range of other matters.

How do you see the meta tags on the page posted on the internet by another company or website?

Firstly, if you are in Internet Explorer, click View on the toolbar, select Source.

A text box will open and in the text box you will see lots of code.

Have a look for a piece of coding with the word head in it, and below that you ought to see the word meta.

Usually there are three to six meta tags, and each one will have a different name, so next to the word meta, you will see words such as refresh, keyword, description, title and robots. All of these indicate to you that firstly the website has had some search engine optimisation done to it, and secondly that the site contains instructions for robots as to what to do when they visit the site.

Some search engines still pick up meta tags, but Google stopped placing a lot of emphasis on them quite a while ago as they started to get fairly well abused by websites that contained more spam than actual use.

These days it appears Google places more emphasis on in bound links as opposed to actual descriptions on the website.

However, they are still very important, and other search engines use them for a whole host of reasons.

For further information and search engine optimisation and online and offline marketing, please visit www.chesterwebmarketing.co.uk