Meta Tags-The Real Story
META tags are html tags that refer to key information directed at the search engine spiders to help them decipher your site. Meta tags are placed inside the <head></head> tags and can convey a wide range of information about your site to the search spiders. This can help the spiders understand where you should be indexed, who the author is, copyright, email, distribution…This information will help your site.
Search engines began dropping support for meta data provided by the meta element in 1998, and by the early 2000s, most search engines had veered completely away from reliance on meta elements. In July 2002 AltaVista, one of the last major search engines to still offer support, finally stopped considering them. This happened due to spam sites and scammers abusing the keyword attribute. However, the amount of information they can convey to spiders makes them very valuable indeed. If they are not abused they will help your site rank better in the serps.
The keywords attribute was popularized by search engines such as Infoseek and AltaVista in 1995, and its popularity quickly grew until it became one of the most commonly used meta elements. By late 1997, however, search engine providers realized that information stored in meta elements, especially the keyword attribute, was often unreliable and misleading, and at worst, used to draw users into spam sites. (Unscrupulous webmasters could easily place false keywords into their meta elements in order to draw people to their site.)
Search engines began dropping support for metadata provided by the meta element in 1998, and by the early 2000s, most search engines had veered completely away from reliance on meta elements. In July 2002 AltaVista, one of the last major search engines to still offer support, finally stopped considering them.
No consensus exists whether or not the keywords attribute has any impact on ranking at any of the major search engines today. It is speculated that it does, if the keywords used in the meta can also be found in the page copy itself. With respect to Google, thirty-seven leaders in search engine optimization concluded in April 2007 that the relevance of having your keywords in the meta-attribute keywords is little to none. However, the same article also suggests that Yahoo still makes use of the keywords meta tag in some of its rankings. Yahoo itself claims support for the keyword meta tag in conjunction with other factors for improving search rankings.
Here are a few quick examples of meta tags in case your not sure what I am discussing, there are many more META tags.
- <meta name=”description” content=”a description of your site”>
- <meta name=”keywords” content=”your,keywords,separated,by,commas”>
- <meta name=”robots or spiders” content=”index or no index”>
- <meta name=”distribution” content=”global”>
- <meta name=”owner or author” content=”you or your company name”>
As I stated above you can use this tag to list key information associated with your website. One of the most important attribute you need to utilize is the description. Unlike the keyword attribute, the description attribute is supported by most major search engines, like Yahoo and Live Search, while Google will fall back on this tag when information about the page itself is requested (e.g. using the related: query).
The description attribute provides a concise explanation of a Web page’s content. This allows the webpage authors to give a more meaningful description for listings than might be displayed if the search engine was unable to automatically create its own description based on the page content. The description is often, but not always, displayed on search engine results pages, so it can impact click-through rates. Industry commentators have suggested that major search engines also consider keywords located in the description attribute when ranking pages. W3C doesn’t specify the size of this description meta tag, but almost all search engines recommend it to be shorter than 200 characters of plain text.
Honest and legitimate use of meta data will only help your site become more search engine friendly, it will never hurt it unless you are a spammer. So get those tags in order and let the spiders digest the info as they see fit.
Thanx and remember…Always strive to improve and success will follow
David Knops Jr
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