Using META Tags: An Introduction

Meta Tags are an important, but often-overlooked element of HTML coding. Meta tags are included in the head section of your webpage. The head section is not visible when you view your webpage in a browser, but the elements it contains can have a great effect on how search-engines treat your webpage.The most important of these are the title, description and keywords tags.

The title tag, although not really a meta tag, is worth including in any discussion of search-engine ranking.Whatever text is placed between the title tags will appear in the title bar of the viewer's browser window. The title tag is crucial to search-engines and the text therein is almost certainly the most important factor in search engine ranking.

Next we have the meta description tag:

META name= description content= page description

You will note that there is no at the end of this tag. META is not a container tag. It stands alone. Therefore, no closing tag is needed. For strict XHTML compliance, add a slash before the closing bracket, like this:

META name=description content=page description

This tag allows you to describe your webpage to search-engine crawlers. The description should generally be 200 to 250 characters in length. There are some search engines that ignore the meta description tag. For instance, Google generates its own page descriptions from the body content of your webpage. For most search-engines, however, creating a meta description tag is certainly worthwhile.

The meta keywords tag:

META name= keywords content=page keywords and phrases

This meta tag allows you to provide additional search terms for web crawlers or search engine spiders to associate with your webpage. It indicates which words in your webpage content you think are most important for indexing purposes. Many internet marketers swear by the creation of keyword-rich content. If your website is to be about "car loans," for example, these marketers might suggest that you include the phrases "car loan," "new car loan," "used car loan" and "auto loan" in multiple parts of your body copy, then add these keywords to yourmeta keyword tag. Doing this can help to raise the ranking of your page for these specific keywords. Note that if the terms in your meta keywords tag are not found in the body content, more sophisticated search engines will ignore some or all of your keyword terms, and may even penalize your page ranking. Generally, though, the influence of the meta keywords tag isn't what it used to be, and many search engines are starting to ignore it altogether.

The meta robots tag allows you to specify whether a particular page should be indexed by search engines. The following tag is the equivalent of hanging a "Robots Keep Out!" sign on your webpage:

META name= robots content=noindex,nofollow

You might choose to include this tag to keep web crawlers from indexing a page that isn't finished yet. Don't forget to remove it after the design is finalized!

For any pages that you want indexed immediately, you can leave out the meta robots tag. That's like hanging up a "Robots Are Welcome!" sign. Most search engines support the meta robots tag. For more control over search-engine indexing, you can also use a robots.txt file.

Though it isn't visible inside the browser, the contents of the head tag can have a big effect on your search-engine rankings. Though the title tag is most important, the meta description tag is well-supported and worth using. The meta keywords tag is harder to use, and may not be worth your time. Finally, the meta robots tag is handy when you're creating temporary pages that you don't want to be indexed yet.

2006-03-29 23:42:52