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1 December 2007
Quick Links: Search Engine Optimisation
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Search Engine Optimisation |
A lot of people have this misconception about meta tags being the magic key to achieve top rankings in search engines. If you think skyrocketing to the top of the rankings charts is such a cake-walk, think again!
Let us find out more about meta-tags, right from ground zero, and also explore other related facts in the following article.
A meta tag is essentially a hidden piece of information inserted into the <HEAD> area of an HTML document. It not necessary to use meta tags while you’re creating your web pages, as it just serves the purpose of providing additional details about the page. This information is not viewed by the people who browse your site; rather it does not even concern the users at all. Roughly speaking, the meta description allows search engines to accurately enlist your website in their indexes. These tags also have other functions like informing a browser about which character set to use and also, distinguishing between a webpage which has self-rated itself in the context of adult material, and one which has not.
The structure of a meta tag usually follows the normal form of tags, just that the meta element is present at the topmost part of a web document. It looks like this:
<META name=”xyz” content=”abc”>
But note that, unlike in the case of normal tags, where we have a structure like <BOLD> bold </BOLD>, there is no need for a </META> as a closing tag. Also, some search engine crawlers have known to be a bit peevish about line breaks in tags, so it is best to avoid them.
There are three possible attributes of a meta tag: content, name and http-equiv. Meta tags usually furnish information to the users in the order of a name/value pair and each of these attributes supply either name or value information of the HTML document.
You might want to index every single webpage on their website. This is completely unnecessary and using a few sample pages would do just as fine. Also, provide a good description of your page in the description tag and don’t just rewrite the title in a different manner. You can put meta tags on every webpage, and not just on the home and the index pages, to increase your chances of getting a higher ranking on search engines.
A lot of people might consider using their rival’s name in their meta tags. So that if a customer searches for your competitor’s name, he will be directed to your site and just might end up buying your product. Seems like a very smart idea, but DO NOT ever do it! Many countries have strict laws against committing such acts and you would not want to be involved in legal issues while building your website.
Although meta tags are a great tool to ‘improve’ your rankings, they do not give you a guarantee for the same, especially in the case of crawler-based search engines. But the important advantage that these tags offer you is that they supply you with a certain amount of control over the way your web pages are described by particular search engines. You can also prevent some of your pages from being indexed at all with the help of these.
Another essential fact that most people forget is that search engines invariably, not only scan the body of the pages’ text, but also their respective titles. In fact, they consider this information to be more valuable than meta tags themselves. So, having relevant content as well as a suitable title for each of your webpage can improve your ranks, a lot more than focusing only on meta tags.
