Meta Tags & Search Engines
By Danny Sullivan, Editor
Want to get a top ranking in search engines? No
problem! All you need to do is add a few magical
"meta tags" to your web pages, and you'll skyrocket
to the top of the listings.
If only it were so easy. Let's make it clear:
- Meta tags are not a magic solution.
- Meta tags are not a magic solution.
- Meta tags are not a magic solution.
Meta tags have never been a guaranteed way to
gain a top ranking on crawler-based search engines.
Today, the most valuable feature they offer the web
site owner is the ability to control to some degree
how their web pages are described by some search
engines. They also offer the ability to prevent
pages from being indexed at all. This page explores
these and other meta tag-related features in more
depth.
Meta Tag Overview
What are meta tags? They are information inserted
into the "head" area of your web pages. Other than
the title tag (explained below), information in the head area of your web
pages is not seen by those viewing your pages in
browsers. Instead, meta information in this area is
used to communicate information that a human visitor
may not be concerned with. Meta tags, for example,
can tell a browser what "character set" to use or
whether a web page has self-rated itself in terms of
adult content.
Let's see two common types of meta tags, then
we'll discuss exactly how they are used in more
depth:
In the example above, you can see the beginning
of the page's "head" area as noted by the HEAD tag
-- it ends at the portion shown as /HEAD.
Meta tags go in between the "opening" and
"closing" HEAD tags. Shown in the example is a TITLE
tag, then a META DESCRIPTION tag, then a META
KEYWORDS tag. Let's talk about what these do.
The Title Tag
The HTML title tag isn't really a meta tag, but
it's worth discussing in relation to them. Whatever
text you place in the title tag (between the TITLE
and /TITLE portions as shown in the example) will
appear in the reverse bar of someone's browser when
they view the web page. For instance, within the
title tag of this page that you are reading is this
text:
How To Use HTML Meta Tags
If you look at the reverse bar in your browser,
then you should see that text being used, similar to
this:
Some browsers also supplement whatever you put in
the title tag by adding their own name, as you can
see Microsoft's Internet Explorer doing in the
picture above.
The title tag is also used as the words to
describe your page when someone adds it to their
"Favorites" or "Bookmarks" lists. For instance, if
you added this page to your Favorites in Internet
Explorer, it would show up like this:
How did that little Search Engine Watch logo also
show up? Everyone always asks. The article below
provides more help:
Creating Your Own Favicon.ico
Icon For IE5
HTML tutorial 44
But what about search engines! The title tag is
crucial for them. The text you use in the title tag
is one of the most important factors in how a search
engine may decide to rank your web page. In addition, all major crawlers will use
the text of your title tag as the text they use for
the title of your page in your listings.
For example, this is how Teoma lists the page you
are reading:
You can see that the text "How To Use HTML Meta
Tags" is used as the hyperlinked title of this
page's listed in Teoma's results.
In review, think about the key terms you'd like
your page to be found for in crawler-based search
engines, then incorporate those terms into your
title tag in a short, descriptive fashion. That text
will then be used as your title in crawler-based
search engines, as well as the title in bookmarks
and in browser reverse bars.
The Meta Description Tag
The meta description tag allows you to influence
the description of your page in the crawlers that
support the tag.
Look back at the example of a meta tag. See the first meta tag shown, the one
that says "name=description"? That's the meta
description tag. The text you want to be shown as
your description goes between the quotation marks
after the "content=" portion of the tag (generally,
200 to 250 characters may be indexed, though only a
smaller portion of this amount may be displayed).
For this page you are reading, I would like it
described in a search engine's listings like this:
This tutorial explains how to
use HTML meta tags, with links
to meta tag generators and builders. From
SearchEngineWatch.com,
a guide to search engine submission and
registration.
Will this happen? Not with every search engine.
For example, Google ignores the meta description tag
and instead will automatically generate its own
description for this page. Others may support it
partially. For instance, let's see again how this
page is listed in Teoma:
You can see that the first portion of the page's
description comes from the meta description tag,
then there's an ellipse (.), and the remaining
portion is drawn from the body copy of the page
itself.
In review, it is worthwhile to use the meta
description tag for your pages, because it gives you
some degree of control with various crawlers. An
easy way to do this often is to take the first
sentence or two of body copy from your web page and
use that for the meta description content.
The Meta Keywords Tag
The meta keywords tag allows you to provide
additional text for crawler-based search engines to
index along with your body copy. How does this help
you? Well, for most major crawlers, it doesn't.
That's because most crawlers now ignore the tag.
The meta keywords tag is sometimes useful
as a way to reinforce the terms you think a page is
important for ON THE FEW CRAWLERS THAT SUPPORT IT.
For instance, if you had a page about stamp
collecting -- AND you say the words stamp collecting
at various places in your body copy -- then
mentioning the words "stamp collecting" in the meta
keywords tag MIGHT help boost your page a bit higher
for those words.
Remember, if you don't use the words "stamp
collecting" on the page at all, then just adding
them to the meta keywords tag is extremely unlikely
to help the page do well for the term. The text in
the meta keywords tag, FOR THE FEW CRAWLERS THAT
SUPPORT IT, works in conjunction with the text in
your body copy.
The meta keyword tag is also sometimes useful as
a way to help your page come up for synonyms or
unusual words that don't appear on the page itself.
For instance, let's say you had a page all about the
"Penny Black" stamp. You never actually say the word
"collecting" on this page. By having the word in
your meta keywords tag, then you may help increase
the odds of coming up if someone searched for "penny
black stamp collecting." Of course you would greater
increase the odds if you just used the word
"collecting" in the body copy of the page itself.
Here's another example. Let's say you have a page
about horseback riding, and you've written your page
using "horseback" as a single word. You realize that
some people may instead search for "horse back
riding," with "horse back" in their searches being
two separate words. If you listed these words
separately in your meta keywords tag, THEN MAYBE FOR
THE FEW CRAWLERS THAT SUPPORT IT, your page might
rank better for "horse back" riding. Sadly, the best
way to ensure this would be to write your pages
using both "horseback riding" and "horse back
riding" in the text -- or perhaps on some of your
pages, use the single word version and on others,
the two word version.
I'm using all these capital letters on purpose.
Far too many people new to search engine
optimization obsess with the meta keywords tag. FEW
crawlers support it. For those that do, it MIGHT!
MAYBE! PERHAPS! POSSIBLY! BUT WITH NO GUARANTEE!
help improve the ranking of your page. It also may
very well do nothing for your page at all. In fact,
repeat a particular word too often in a meta
keywords tag and you could actually harm your page's
chances of ranking well. Because of this, I strongly
suggest that those new to search engine optimization
not even worry about the tag at all.
Even those who are experienced in search engine
optimization may decide it is no longer worth using
the tags. Search Engine Watch doesn't. Any meta
keywords tags you find in the site were written in
the past, when the keywords tag was more important.
There's no harm in leaving up existing tags you may
have written, but going forward, writing new tags
probably isn't worth the trouble.
Still want to use the meta keywords tag? OK. Look
back at the opening example. See the second meta tag shown, the one that says
"name=keywords"? That's the meta keywords tag. The
keywords you want associated with your page go
between the quotation marks after the "content="
portion of the tag.
Inktomi says that you should include up to 25
words or phrases, with each word or phrase separated
by commas. More advice from Inktomi can be found on its
Content Policy FAQ.
FYI, in the past, when the tag was supported by
other search engines, they generally indexed up to
1,000 characters of text and commas were not
required.
Meta Robots Tag
One other meta tag worth mentioning is the robots
tag. This lets you specify that a particular page
should NOT be indexed by a search engine. To keep
spiders out, simply add this text between your head
tags on each page you don't want indexed. The format
is shown below (click on the picture if you want to
copy and past the HTML for your own use):
You do NOT need to use variations of the meta
robots tag to help your pages get indexed. They are
unnecessary. By default, a crawler will try to index
all your web pages and will try to follow links from
one page to another.
Most major search engines support the meta robots
tag. However, the robots.txt convention of blocking
indexing is more efficient, as
you don't need to add tags to each and every page.
If you use a robots.txt file to block indexing, there is no need to also use meta
robots tags.
Other Meta Tags
There are many other meta tags that exist beyond
those explored in this article. For example, if you
were to view the source code of this web page, you
would find "author," "channel" and "date" meta tags.
These mean nothing to web-wide crawlers such as
Google. They are specifically for an internal search
engine used by Search Engine Watch to index its own
content.
There are also "Dublin Core" meta tags. The
intent is that these can be used for both "internal"
search engines and web-wide ones. However, no major
web-wide search engine supports these tags. More
about them can be found below:
How about the meta revisit tag? This tag is not
recognized by the major search engines as a method
of telling them how often to automatically return.
They have never supported it.
In Conclusion
Overall, just remember this. Of all the meta tags you may see out there:
-
Meta Robots: This tag
enjoys full support, but you only need it if you
DO NOT want your pages indexed.
-
Meta Description: This tag
enjoys much support, and it is well worth using.
-
Meta Keywords: This tag is
only supported by some major crawlers and probably
isn't worth the time to implement.
-
Meta Everything Else: Any
other meta tag you see is ignored by the major
crawlers, though they may be used by specialized
search engines.
I hope this came in useful!
Ask in the forum
if you have any suggestions or comments.