Tutorials - Meta Tags: Tagging for Search Engines

In the absence of other information, the Sacramento State search engine, Google, will index all the words in a document except for comments, and will use the first few words as a summary to describe your page in the search results.

You can use the HTML <meta> tag to specify the summary text that will appear in a search results list and to control if and how your page is indexed by Google. The meta tags must be placed in the <head> section of your Web page. Do not use any HTML tags within the meta tag itself.

The DESCRIPTION and KEYWORDS Meta Tags

Suppose your page contains:

<meta name="description" content="California State University, Sacramento is California's capital university and one of the largest campuses in the CSU system." />

<meta name="keywords" content="Sac State, Sacramento State, California State University Sacramento" />

Google will do two things with these tags:

It will index all of the keyword tag words/phrases contained in the content attribute, so a search on any of the words/phrases will match.
It will show the "description" with the search results. Thus, instead of showing the first few of lines of the page as the summary, it would be listed as follows:

California State University, Sacramento
California State University, Sacramento is California's capital university and one of the largest campuses in the CSU system.

Note that the description and keywords meta tags should not contain any HTML formatting information.

You can also visit the Meta Tag Generator to create meta tags for your HTML document.

last reviewed: January 29, 2008