Finally, we can post a reply to an issue that came up in our first Civics & Coffee event: What’s the difference between a tag and a metatag?
Tags and metatags are pretty easy to understand really – both are just labels you put on different types of web content. In both cases you want to have labels that describe what you wrote about. You do this for a blog by tagging the post with key words and phrases that describe the subject of that post. The point here is to help people who are searching for posts on whatever your subject happens to be, or else on subjects that are clearly related.
(Using misleading and irrelevant tags to attract attention won’t do any good unless your goal is to annoy people.)
Metatags are words and phrases that describe the content of each Web page, not the entire site. This task is usually reserved for those experienced in HTML, ie., a webmaster. For everyone else that is not an expert at Web programming, you too can create metatags if you use some Web site creation tools.
For example, I’ve created sites in Tripod.com and used their very simple tool for adding metatags to each page. I added some words and phrases that related to the content of the page and that was all.
Three Tips for Tags and Metatags:
1. You should not waste space on different forms of most words. Use “activist” and a search engine will return that page in a list of results for “activists.”
2. If some of the words are likely to be misspelled you could include the most likely variations.
3. Don’t forget common variations on words. “Eco-city” and “ecocity” could both be listed if relevant to your post or page.
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