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 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
Web Developer's Journal, March 7, 2000
http://www.webdevelopersjournal.com/articles/favicon.html
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 (see the
Search Engine Placement Tips section
for more details). 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.
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 (these are listed on the
Search Engine Features page).
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 few supporting it
can be found on the
Search Engine Features page).
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. The articles below explores this in more
detail:
Death Of A Meta Tag
The Search Engine Report, Oct. 1,
2002
Meta Tags Revisited
The Search Engine Report, Dec. 5, 2002
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.
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. See the
Search Engines Features page for more
about the robots.txt file. If you use do a robots.txt file to block indexing,
there is no need to also use meta robots tags.
The meta robots tag also has
some extensions offered by particular search engines to prevent indexing of
multimedia content. The article below talks about this in more depth and
provides some links to help files. Search Engine Watch members should follow the
link from the article to the members-only edition for extended help on the
subject.
Image Search Faces Renewed Legal Challenge
The Search Engine Report, August 22,
2001
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.
More Resources
At the bottom of this page are
more resources about meta tags, including tutorials and meta tag building
applications. But first.
If you've been following the
"Next" buttons to read the numbered sections of the
Search Engine Submission Tips
guide in order, you've now reached the last page. Congratulations!
There's still more information
you might find helpful, however. Please review the pages listed under the
Optional But Helpful section for
additional assistance with search engine marketing issues.
In addition, do consider
becoming a Search Engine Watch
member, for access to even more
information on search engine marketing issues.
Just started learning from
this page? Don't worry --
click here
to go to the beginning of the guide.
Now, here are those additional
meta tag resources and articles.
Meta Tag Generators, Builders
and Evaluators
Site Announce Meta Tag Generator
Simple, free online form that creates basic meta tags for your web pages.
SiteUp's Meta-Tag Generator
This is a software-based package for
Windows that creates meta tags. It is a freeware package -- no registration fee
required.
Meta
Tag Builder
This form allows you to create very
complicated meta tags using much more than the keywords and description tags, if
you wish. Note that it will place a commented credit line into the tag. This can
easily be removed, if you wish.
Articles About Meta Tags
Death Of A Meta Tag
The Search Engine Report, Oct. 1, 2002
Now supported by only one
major crawler-based search engine, the value of adding meta keywords tags to
pages seems little worth the time. A look at how we gained and lost the meta
keywords tag.
Meta Tags Revisited
The Search Engine Report, Dec. 5, 2002
Follow-up to the article
above.
Web spec searches for small businesses
ZDNet, Jan. 15, 2003
Discusses a new idea for
allowing small and medium sized businesses to describe themselves to search
engines through meta data in XML files. Given the bad history search engines
have with meta data, I think it's unlikely you'll see this be accepted.
Are
search engines dead?
WDVL, June 26, 2000
A look at the RDF meta data
structure and how search engines aren't using it. Why not? Experience has taught
them that meta data often cannot be trusted.
The New Meta Tags Are Coming -- Or Are They?
The Search Engine Report, Dec. 4, 1997
The proposed Resource
Description Framework, or RDF, would provide a new way of describing web pages
via meta data. There are high hopes for what it may accomplish, but support by
the search engines isn't certain. Also learn more about the Dublin Core meta
tags, which may be incorporated into the system.
