UK Web Site Design and Search Engine Optimisation
What are Meta Tags?
Before we begin, let us say one thing that meta tags are not. They are not a magic bullet for making your website jump to the top of the search engines. Sorry, but I had to get that out of the way.
Okay, so back to the beginning. Meta tags are pieces of information that are inserted into the head of your web page. Meta data can be used to identify the document’s keywords, description, author and much more.
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Manwah Design :: What is a Meta Tag?</TITLE>
<META name="description" content="An article that describes the use
of HTML meta tags in web pages.">
<META name="keywords" content="meta tags,meta keywords,page header">
<META name="author" content="Matthew Chan-Pensley">
<META name="copyright" content="©2004 Manwah Design">
<META http-equiv="Expires" content="Fri, 22 Oct 2004 18:30:55 GMT">
</HEAD>
The most common form of the meta tag exists in the form of the name attribute, although meta tags are typically found with one of two attributes, HTTP-EQUIV or NAME.
The HTTP-EQUIV attribute indicates that the property is an HTTP header. Typical information set in HTTP-EQUIV tags are document expiry dates, content type information and document refresh information. Unless you wish to use them in a programming capacity, there is no need to include HTTP-EQUIV tags within your web page.
The Title Tag
The title tag is not itself a meta tag, but is a very important factor in ranking well within the search engines. This text will appear in the bar at the very top of your web browser, and it will also be the default information that appears on the results page at the search engines. The title tag is also the default information that is used if someone wants to add your page to their favourites list. When choosing your title, you should ensure that it is short but descriptive including your most important keywords.
The Meta Description Tag
Some search engines use the meta description of a web page as a part of their results, usually directly under the page title. Your description should be an expanded version of page title, running to around 250 characters. Every page should have its’ own unique description, and again you can use this area to include keywords that you did not put into the title.
Remember that this does not mean you will automatically rank higher within the search engines. However, it is a good practice to get into the habit of as on top of any other benefits, it provides useful information describing the actual content of your page.
The Meta Keywords Tag
This has been the most used and abused tag since the creation of the web pages. These days it has relatively little influence and is ignored by most search engines. The best way to use the keyword tag is to place your most important phrases, along with synonyms in a comma delimited list and leave it at that.
Don’t get caught up wasting any more than a few seconds over it, as there are far more important and influential things that you can spend your time working on.
The Meta Robots Tag
The robots tag can be useful when you wish to avoid having a page indexed. Do not include this tag if all you want to do is to get a search engine to index your page as search engines try to index every page they find following their own schedule.
As a general rule, when you do not want pages indexed by search engines it is more efficient to put this information in a robots.txt file. However, including the robots tag in a web page can be more convenient to use in certain instances.
In order to instruct a search engine to not index the current page using the robots tag, simply include the following code in the page header:
<META name="robots" content="NOINDEX">
Other Meta Tags
There are many more meta tags which have not been covered here, but in order to keep your page well optimised it is not worth including any further meta data as it is superfluous.
Final Words
The description, keywords and robots meta tags are considered the core tags. All of these can provide beneficial information for your web page, but it is up to you to decide when and to what extent that they can be useful. At the end of the day, keep your code clean and efficient and you won’t go far wrong.