Header tags are also called meta tags. I call them header tags because they appear between the < head > and < /head > tags in your html source document. There are three of them that you need to concern yourself when it comes to your Search Engine Optimization efforts.

Here’s what they are:

• TITLE
• DESCRIPTION
• KEYWORDS

First of all, these tags are important for Search Engine Optimization reasons. Your title and description tags will actually appear on the search engine results pages when your site is found for a particular query. The title tag is the first thing that searchers will see on the results page. It is also a link that when clicked takes the searcher to your website. That’s pretty important, right?

The description tag is often used as your snippet below the title link in the results page. If you optimize both your title and your description tag with your important keywords then you will increase your chances of ranking highly in the search engine results pages for those keywords.

The keywords tag is the least important of the three, but it’s still relatively important. Most beginning webmasters will make the mistake of adding every keyword important to their website to the keywords tag. You don’t want to do that. You only want to include 3-5 important keywords per page in that keywords meta tag. If a word doesn’t appear on a page, even if it’s important to your website as a whole, don’t include it in your keywords tag. It won’t help you.

Those are the three header tags that you need to pay attention to. They are not the be all end all to search engine optimization, but without the header tags you will struggle in the search engine results page.