Welcome back. Now that you understand the separate focus areas of SEO, this lesson will introduce core concepts regarding on-page SEO that you will need to understand before moving on to more in-depth topics. When you look at a search result, are you able to understand all of the components of the result? After this lesson, you will be able to understand what meta data and meta tags mean, as well as analyze the search results and recognize the individual meta data elements. Before we begin, let's discuss the anatomy of a search result. When you perform a search in a search engine, you will get a page of results that look like this. This is a single result from the page. In this search result, I have colored each individual area, so you can better spot what areas I'm referring to as I speak. Each of the areas you see here are related to SEO, and are areas we focus on in our on-page optimization process. When referring to all of these areas together, they are known as a site's meta data. But each individual area has its own name. The term meta data basically means data that describes other data. Each page of a website contains an area of meta data. This area is made up of individual meta tags. These individual meta tags are small snippets of text that help search engines identify important information about the page, such as what the page is about. Or whether or not search engine robots should ignore the page. This information is contained within the source code of a page, which means it is not publicly viewable, unless you specifically view that code that makes up the page. In the source code, each page has a head element. Which is a container for meta data, and is location at the top of the page. Let's go back to our first example, so we can view the various meta data elements. This is a search result for the UC Davis Winemaking certificate program. To get this result to display, I searched Google for, online winemaking course. Let's take a moment to examine this result. The area in blue is what we call the title tag. The title tag describes the title, or name, the webmaster gave to this specific page. The area in green is the website address, or URL of the page. This isn't actually part of the meta data that you can define. Search engines will pull the URL from the page it is analyzing. The text underneath is the meta description, which is the block of text describing the content you will find on the page. Note that within the medic description, some words are boldened. These words are boldened because they match the words we use in our search query. These words are what we call, keywords. You can see that all the keywords do not need to appear together in order to be boldened. So my search for online winemaking course also bolded the word courses, because Google can recognize the plural version of course, as well as the words online and winemaking. Note that in this instance here, the word class is also bolded. This is because Google recognizes that courses and class are semantically related. When we refer to metadata, we are referring to the various elements that encompass the way this search result was displayed. Let's take a bit of a deeper look at the individual elements. You should now be able to define metadata as well as look at a search result and recognize individual metadata elements. That completes the video portion of this lesson.
