Home  Other IT Meta Tags and Search Engines
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Meta Tags and Search Engines |
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Written by Jamie Birch
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Meta tags are a part of HTML that the surfer never sees. They are not included for the surfer's benefit and their contents are not printed to the screen. The main use of meta tags ...
Meta Tags & Search Engines by Jamie Birch
Meta Tags and the Search Enginesby Jamie Birch
ContentsIntroduction
Meta tag usage
keywords tag
description tag
refresh tag
robots tag
title tag
Miscellaneous
Introduction
Meta tags are a part of HTML that the surfer never sees. They are not included for the surfer's benefit and their contents are not printed to the screen. The main use of meta tags is to provide information for the search engines to use when evaluating a page's content. HTML pages do not need to include any meta tags at all.
Usage
Meta tags belong in the head section of a page and each meta tag contains two elements or properties; (1) its name, (2) its content. Example:-
<meta name="keywords" content="keyword one, keyword two, etc"> To get the best from the search engines, each page of a web site should contain the correct meta tags and the tags should contain the correct information for the page. On the same site, different pages are often concerned with different topics and the 'content' of the meta tags should reflect the page's topic or content. Sometimes it is desireable for a page not to be indexed by the search engines, in which case only the 'robots' tag need be included. Of the many different meta tags, the ones that concern us in our dealings with the search engines are:- keywords (as the example), description, refresh and robots. The keywords and description tags help us to achieve top rankings in most search engines, the refresh tag has the capability of destroying them and the robots tag gives instructions to the the search engine robots/spiders (the web travelling programs that are used to index web sites and pages).
The 'keywords' meta tag
The keywords tag is used to provide the search engines with appropriate keywords and keyphrases for the page. These will be indexed by many engines and can boost the page's relevancy, and therefore its rankings, for the appropriate search terms. This is the place to put the words and phrases that you think surfers are most likely to type into a search engine's search box. It is not the only place to put them, but it is an important one. For example, if you have a web page that sells dog food, the meta keywords tag may look like this:- <meta name="keywords" content="dog food, dogs, pet food, pets, dry, wet, canned dog food, pet supplies, etc">Notice that it includes both words and phrases. There are a few important things to remember: 1. Length (number of keywords in the tag)
The overall length of your keyword tag should be around 25 - 30 words. Never mind whether they are phrases or not, just count the words. Now you need to remember that much of what we do is trial and error so, if you have had success with smaller or larger keyphrase tags, then stick with what is working. But this guideline is a good place to start. I have tried a variety of lengths on my pages and even had success with pages that target just one keyword. But 25 - 30 words is a good place to start. 2. Weight
You may wish to use plenty of keywords and key phrases to gain a wide coverage but one or two of them may be much more important than the others. This is where weight or positioning comes into play. Search engines often take into account how much of the keywords content is given over to a particular word or phrase. In the following example, the weight of the word "dog" is 25% - for obvious reasons. <meta name=keywords content="dog food pets chow"> The weightier a word or phrase is, the more relevance it has. See item 5. 3. Prominence
This refers to how close to the beginning of the tag the keyword resides. The closer to the beginning the higher the prominence. In the above example, dog would have a prominence of 100%. So remember to put your most important keywords at the beginning. 4. Using commas to seperate words and phrases
People's opinions differ on this. I prefer not to use them. The school of thought being: when keywords are separated by a space and no commas, the search engine indexing them may be able to make more combinations between the words. You may like to try both methods and see what kind of success they bring. I have had greater success without them but I have given examples of both. 5. Repetition
You may want to repeat your most important keywords in this tag to give them extra weight. Repeating them more than three times may be considered as spam by some search engines so don't overdo it. Having the keyword at the beginning, the middle and the end of the tag may give it more relevance. Remember that more than three may be treading on spamming issues. The one thing not to do is to have several repetitions of the same word in succession - not even twice in a row. This is not very popular with the search engines. If the important keywords and phrases come under the "must have" heading, it would probably be better to create an individual page for each of them. 6. Case sensitivity
Some engines are case sensitive and some are not. To allow for this, many people include each keyword and/or keyphrase in lower, upper and proper case versions within the keywords tag. E.g. keyword, key phrase, KEYWORD, KEY PHRASE, Keyword, Key Phrase. Personally, I believe that most surfers don't bother with upper case characters when searching the web and I prefer to include more keywords than use up the space in this way.
The 'description' meta tag
<meta name="description" content="Dog foods and other pet supplies at DiscountPetFoods.com. Find Purina Puppy Chow and other dog food brands here."> When you look at a list of search results, each listed site/page usually has a description of what the site/page is about. This is not the title which is normally dispayed in bold. Most engines get the description from this meta tag althougn a few take it from the printable text in the page itself. For most engines, this is the place to write a short piece of text to grab the surfer's attention. It is also used in determining the relevance of the given search term to your page, which means that not only should it grab the surfer's attention, but it should also be used to grab the engine's attention during a search. In other words, you must include your important keywords and phrases in the description tag. Search engines truncate the display of descriptions when they are too long so do a search on the engine you are aiming at, check out the length of description that they are displaying and write yours to fit. It is better to have a complete description on display that to have it stop suddenly in mid sentence. I like to keep my description tags to about 25-30 words. I try to lead off the description with my most important keyword and then try to repeat the same keyword twice more. You may consider putting both singular and plural versions of the keyword in the description. Some engines recognize both, and some are sensitive to which is searched for. If a surfer types in "dogs" (plural), some engines will show results for both "dog" and "dogs" while others will show only the results for "dogs". It is well worth spending a little time over the description to make it appeal to surfers whilst featuring your most important keywords and/or phrases. When writing the description, remember that anything meant to mislead the surfer to places that they did not want to go is considered Spam and highly frowned upon by this association and all the major search engines. Misleading and irrelevant descriptions are considered to be spam.
The 'refresh' meta tag
This is what it looks like:- <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=nextpage.html"> It's effect is to automatically load the next page in the number of seconds specified. The example would fetch the next page in 0 seconds. It is sometimes used unscrupulously to redirect surfers to sites and pages that they didn't choose to go to. The search engines are wise to it and penalise sites and pages that use this technique. The moral is - don't do it.
The 'robots' meta tag
This is used to pass instructions to the search engines' robots - often referred to as spiders or crawlers. Robots are used to crawl web sites and gather pages for the search engines to evaluate and index. Some engines, such as AltaVista and Excite, have their own robots. Others use various databases such as Inktomi. Either way, a robot is always used to gather pages. <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> The robots meta tag is used to pass intructions to the robots. Many of them accept the instructions, particularly those from the major engines and databases. The content is always one word. The recognized words are:- index, noindex, follow, nofollow, all and none. Because the spiders will always index and follow by default which is equivalent to the all content, don't use this tag for anything but the things that change the default behaviour, i.e. noindex, nofollow or none. Anything else is a waste of bytes.
| index |
= index this page * |
| noindex |
= don't index this page |
| follow |
= follow the links from this page to get more pages * |
| nofollow |
= don't follow the links from this page |
| all |
= index this page and follow the links from it * |
| none |
= don't index this page and don't follow the links |
* = default setting (no need for a tag)
The 'title' tag
The 'title' tag isn't a meta tag but it belongs in the same part of an HTML page as the meta tags (the head) and so it is included here. It looks like this. <title>Title of this page</title> Surfers never see the page's title except in the browser's address window but it is very important to the success of the optimization process because (a) it is usually displayed in search engines' listings and therefore it must attract surfers and (b) it is one of the page parts that spiders use to ascertain what the page is about and to index it accordingly. Here is a typical extract from a search engine's listing:- Jamie's Dog Food
Find dog food and other pet food here. Order Purina, Puppychow and others direct and have it delivered to anywhere in the United States for $1!
http://www.jdfood.com The first line of the listing is the contents of the page's title tag. The most important characteristic is that the title tells surfers what the page is about. If the page is about dog food, say so in its title. E.g. <title>Jamie's Dog Food Page. Buy Dog Food Here!</title>. The title is very simple and says exactly what the page is about. If it offers discounts, say so:- <title>Jamie's Dog Food at terrific discounts!</title>. So the title must be written to attract surfers. However, it should also contain keywords. This is very important. Almost every search engine indexes the title tag and some only index this tag so it is important that it is optimized with your most important keywords. This is where the juggling begins. The length of the title matters. About 4 to 10 words is recommended and in those 10 words the title needs to be written so that it contains the important keywords while at the same time, it attracts surfers. If the keyword is "Dog Food", the title may look like this: <title>Dog Food and Pet Food At Jamie's Dog Food Emporium!</title> The keyword is placed at the beginning and is repeated - but only once. The title is 10 words long and makes sense to surfers. That is the key. Balance optimization with usability. Keep the title understandable so that surfers will click on your listings. Every page within the site should have a different title to utilize the different information on each page. This enables more keywords to be targeted in the title tags. If the dog food site has a page devoted to canned dog food, it can be reflected in the title.
Miscellaneous
Some of the major search engines that do not use meta tags in their indexing are:- Google, Lycos and Northernlight. Excite uses the description but not the keywords. The most important thing to remember is that this area of the Internet is extremely fluid. It seems that every time we learn the algorithms of the search engines they change. The most important tool in our arsenal is the ability to adapt and succeed. Our ability to adapt to this ever changing field separates the winners from the losers. I approach it in this way. I do my own research. I compare many attributes of the top ten pages in my search terms to discover what is getting them high rankings. Then I bounce any new ideas off others in forums such as AIM-Pro. These resources prove to be invaluable. Remember that nothing is concrete and do expect change. Keep your eyes and ears open and you should always be at the leading edge of the gameExample:-
<meta name="keywords" content="keyword one, keyword two, etc"> To get the best from the search engines, each page of a web site should contain the correct meta tags and the tags should contain the correct information for the page. On the same site, different pages are often concerned with different topics and the 'content' of the meta tags should reflect the page's topic or content. Sometimes it is desireable for a page not to be indexed by the search engines, in which case only the 'robots' tag need be included. Of the many different meta tags, the ones that concern us in our dealings with the search engines are:- keywords (as the example), description, refresh and robots. The keywords and description tags help us to achieve top rankings in most search engines, the refresh tag has the capability of destroying them and the robots tag gives instructions to the the search engine robots/spiders (the web travelling programs that are used to index web sites and pages).
The 'keywords' meta tag
The keywords tag is used to provide the search engines with appropriate keywords and keyphrases for the page. These will be indexed by many engines and can boost the page's relevancy, and therefore its rankings, for the appropriate search terms. This is the place to put the words and phrases that you think surfers are most likely to type into a search engine's search box. It is not the only place to put them, but it is an important one. For example, if you have a web page that sells dog food, the meta keywords tag may look like this:- <meta name="keywords" content="dog food, dogs, pet food, pets, dry, wet, canned dog food, pet supplies, etc">Notice that it includes both words and phrases. There are a few important things to remember: 1. Length (number of keywords in the tag)
The overall length of your keyword tag should be around 25 - 30 words. Never mind whether they are phrases or not, just count the words. Now you need to remember that much of what we do is trial and error so, if you have had success with smaller or larger keyphrase tags, then stick with what is working. But this guideline is a good place to start. I have tried a variety of lengths on my pages and even had success with pages that target just one keyword. But 25 - 30 words is a good place to start. 2. Weight
You may wish to use plenty of keywords and key phrases to gain a wide coverage but one or two of them may be much more important than the others. This is where weight or positioning comes into play. Search engines often take into account how much of the keywords content is given over to a particular word or phrase. In the following example, the weight of the word "dog" is 25% - for obvious reasons. <meta name=keywords content="dog food pets chow"> The weightier a word or phrase is, the more relevance it has. See item 5. 3. Prominence
This refers to how close to the beginning of the tag the keyword resides. The closer to the beginning the higher the prominence. In the above example, dog would have a prominence of 100%. So remember to put your most important keywords at the beginning. 4. Using commas to seperate words and phrases
People's opinions differ on this. I prefer not to use them. The school of thought being: when keywords are separated by a space and no commas, the search engine indexing them may be able to make more combinations between the words. You may like to try both methods and see what kind of success they bring. I have had greater success without them but I have given examples of both. 5. Repetition
You may want to repeat your most important keywords in this tag to give them extra weight. Repeating them more than three times may be considered as spam by some search engines so don't overdo it. Having the keyword at the beginning, the middle and the end of the tag may give it more relevance. Remember that more than three may be treading on spamming issues. The one thing not to do is to have several repetitions of the same word in succession - not even twice in a row. This is not very popular with the search engines. If the important keywords and phrases come under the "must have" heading, it would probably be better to create an individual page for each of them. 6. Case sensitivity
Some engines are case sensitive and some are not. To allow for this, many people include each keyword and/or keyphrase in lower, upper and proper case versions within the keywords tag. E.g. keyword, key phrase, KEYWORD, KEY PHRASE, Keyword, Key Phrase. Personally, I believe that most surfers don't bother with upper case characters when searching the web and I prefer to include more keywords than use up the space in this way.
The 'description' meta tag
<meta name="description" content="Dog foods and other pet supplies at DiscountPetFoods.com. Find Purina Puppy Chow and other dog food brands here."> When you look at a list of search results, each listed site/page usually has a description of what the site/page is about. This is not the title which is normally dispayed in bold. Most engines get the description from this meta tag althougn a few take it from the printable text in the page itself. For most engines, this is the place to write a short piece of text to grab the surfer's attention. It is also used in determining the relevance of the given search term to your page, which means that not only should it grab the surfer's attention, but it should also be used to grab the engine's attention during a search. In other words, you must include your important keywords and phrases in the description tag. Search engines truncate the display of descriptions when they are too long so do a search on the engine you are aiming at, check out the length of description that they are displaying and write yours to fit. It is better to have a complete description on display that to have it stop suddenly in mid sentence. I like to keep my description tags to about 25-30 words. I try to lead off the description with my most important keyword and then try to repeat the same keyword twice more. You may consider putting both singular and plural versions of the keyword in the description. Some engines recognize both, and some are sensitive to which is searched for. If a surfer types in "dogs" (plural), some engines will show results for both "dog" and "dogs" while others will show only the results for "dogs". It is well worth spending a little time over the description to make it appeal to surfers whilst featuring your most important keywords and/or phrases. When writing the description, remember that anything meant to mislead the surfer to places that they did not want to go is considered Spam and highly frowned upon by this association and all the major search engines. Misleading and irrelevant descriptions are considered to be spam.
The 'refresh' meta tag
This is what it looks like:- <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=nextpage.html"> It's effect is to automatically load the next page in the number of seconds specified. The example would fetch the next page in 0 seconds. It is sometimes used unscrupulously to redirect surfers to sites and pages that they didn't choose to go to. The search engines are wise to it and penalise sites and pages that use this technique. The moral is - don't do it.
The 'robots' meta tag
This is used to pass instructions to the search engines' robots - often referred to as spiders or crawlers. Robots are used to crawl web sites and gather pages for the search engines to evaluate and index. Some engines, such as AltaVista and Excite, have their own robots. Others use various databases such as Inktomi. Either way, a robot is always used to gather pages. <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> The robots meta tag is used to pass intructions to the robots. Many of them accept the instructions, particularly those from the major engines and databases. The content is always one word. The recognized words are:- index, noindex, follow, nofollow, all and none. Because the spiders will always index and follow by default which is equivalent to the all content, don't use this tag for anything but the things that change the default behaviour, i.e. noindex, nofollow or none. Anything else is a waste of bytes.
| index |
= index this page * |
| noindex |
= don't index this page |
| follow |
= follow the links from this page to get more pages * |
| nofollow |
= don't follow the links from this page |
| all |
= index this page and follow the links from it * |
| none |
= don't index this page and don't follow the links |
* = default setting (no need for a tag)
The 'title' tag
The 'title' tag isn't a meta tag but it belongs in the same part of an HTML page as the meta tags (the head) and so it is included here. It looks like this. <title>Title of this page</title> Surfers never see the page's title except in the browser's address window but it is very important to the success of the optimization process because (a) it is usually displayed in search engines' listings and therefore it must attract surfers and (b) it is one of the page parts that spiders use to ascertain what the page is about and to index it accordingly. Here is a typical extract from a search engine's listing:- Jamie's Dog Food
Find dog food and other pet food here. Order Purina, Puppychow and others direct and have it delivered to anywhere in the United States for $1!
http://www.jdfood.com The first line of the listing is the contents of the page's title tag. The most important characteristic is that the title tells surfers what the page is about. If the page is about dog food, say so in its title. E.g. <title>Jamie's Dog Food Page. Buy Dog Food Here!</title>. The title is very simple and says exactly what the page is about. If it offers discounts, say so:- <title>Jamie's Dog Food at terrific discounts!</title>. So the title must be written to attract surfers. However, it should also contain keywords. This is very important. Almost every search engine indexes the title tag and some only index this tag so it is important that it is optimized with your most important keywords. This is where the juggling begins. The length of the title matters. About 4 to 10 words is recommended and in those 10 words the title needs to be written so that it contains the important keywords while at the same time, it attracts surfers. If the keyword is "Dog Food", the title may look like this: <title>Dog Food and Pet Food At Jamie's Dog Food Emporium!</title> The keyword is placed at the beginning and is repeated - but only once. The title is 10 words long and makes sense to surfers. That is the key. Balance optimization with usability. Keep the title understandable so that surfers will click on your listings. Every page within the site should have a different title to utilize the different information on each page. This enables more keywords to be targeted in the title tags. If the dog food site has a page devoted to canned dog food, it can be reflected in the title.
Miscellaneous
Some of the major search engines that do not use meta tags in their indexing are:- Google, Lycos and Northernlight. Excite uses the description but not the keywords. The most important thing to remember is that this area of the Internet is extremely fluid. It seems that every time we learn the algorithms of the search engines they change. The most important tool in our arsenal is the ability to adapt and succeed. Our ability to adapt to this ever changing field separates the winners from the losers. I approach it in this way. I do my own research. I compare many attributes of the top ten pages in my search terms to discover what is getting them high rankings. Then I bounce any new ideas off others in forums such as AIM-Pro. These resources prove to be invaluable. Remember that nothing is concrete and do expect change. Keep your eyes and ears open and you should always be at the leading edge of the game
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