Mark Hammond has had years of experience writing articles for the search engine industry. He now joins the 1st Place Design team where is able to access inside knowledge on the workings of one of Australia's most successful search marketing companies.
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!
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.
What is a Meta Tag?
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.
Attributes of a Meta Tag
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.
- Content – is the attribute which provides the value details in the name/value pair and is a common feature of any well-formed meta tag. The value can be any valid string, enclosed in quotation marks.
- Name – refers to the name section in the name/value
pair. The name can be chosen at random, but should usually be convenient and
useful to the user. A few of the commonly chosen are given below for your
reference:
- Resource-Type – is included for indexing purposes, but the only
resource-type currently being used is “document”. But you
might like to use others as well, maybe on a trial basis.
<META name="resource-type" content="document">
- Keywords – help identify what the webpage is all about and are
normally used in the searches of search engines. Use appropriately chosen
keywords and try to use synonyms, Americanisms etc. to reach out to a
wider audience.
<META name="keywords" content="a, list, of, keywords">
- Description – provides a description of your page and is displayed
alongside your page’s title. Make sure to keep it “short and
sweet”, but don’t compromise on the appropriateness of its
contents to the webpage.
<META name="description" content="a description of your page">
- Author’s details – the author can provide his/her name and
other information like contact number and email address.
<META name="author" content="author’s name">
- Copyright information – you can include the copyright date and
copyright statement of the webpage.
<META name="copyright" content="copyright date">
<META name="copyright" content="copyright statement"> - Distribution – provides details about the kind of content: global/local/for
internal use. This basically facilitates the user to find things easily
by enlisting the available resources.
<META name="distribution" content="one of several"> - http-equiv – also provides the name for the name/value
pair. The only difference is that the server uses ‘http-equiv’
to include the name/value pair in the MIME document header which is passed
onto the browser, before sending forward the actual HTML document. Some common
types of http-equiv are:
- refresh – with the help of this you can set the number of seconds
after which the page reloads itself or reloads to a new page.
<META HTTP-EQUIV="refresh" content="10"> (Reloads the page every 10 seconds)
< META HTTP-EQUIV ="refresh" content="10;url=homepage.htm"> (Reloads to a new page after 10 seconds)
- varname – is used to bind the varname to an HTTP header field. This
is used by an HTTP server to process the web document.
<META HTTP-EQUIV="varname" content="data">
- charset – is used to define the character set used in the document.
<META HTTP-EQUIV ="charset" content="iso-8859-1"> (For the Western Alphabet charset)
- expires – specifies when the page will become out-of-date.
< META HTTP-EQUIV ="expires" content="31 Dec 09">
Some Important Information
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.
The Bottom-line
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.