Meta Tags and How to Use Them

The Meta tags are used by some search engines to allow them to more accurately list your site in their indexes. Information in the meta tags are not seen by those viewing your pages in browsers.

Not all search engines use the meta tags to index sites, but some do. Of the four most popular search engines - Google, AltaVista, FAST, and Inktomi - only one, Inktomi, still indexes web pages using the Keywords meta tag.

However, the Inktomi engine powers a number of smaller search engines, and other search engines (such as Teoma) may still be using meta tags to help index their pages. Plenty of intranets and other subsidiary site searches also use Meta tags. And Inktomi itself is still a force to be reckoned with.

What a Meta Tag Looks Like

You should insert the meta tag element at the top of your document, just after the <TITLE> element. It follows the usual form of tags, ie: < META name="something" content="something else">

Different Meta Tags

The Description Meta Tag

• < META name="description" content="a description of your page">
• Depending on the search engine, this will be displayed along with the title of your page in an index. Keep it short, concise and to the point while at the same time reflecting the contents of your site.
• Generally, 200 to 250 characters may be indexed, though only a smaller portion of this amount may be displayed.
• Google for example, ignores the meta description tag and instead will automatically generate its own description for this page from the opening paragraph on your website.
• Others may support it partially. For example, in search results from Teoma the description is divided into 2 parts: 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.
• The description tag should not simply restate the title of the page, it should describe the page.

Therefore to counteract search engines that do not use the description meta tag, make sure your opening paragraph on your website concisely reflects the contents of your site.

The Keywords Meta Tag

• < META name="keywords" content="a, list, of, keywords">
• The meta keywords tag allows you to provide additional text for crawler-based search engines that do support this tag to index along with your body copy.
• Choose whatever keywords you think are appropriate, separated by commas. Remember to include synonyms, americanisms, etc. For example, if you had a page on fairies, you might want to include keywords such as faery, faerie, sprite, fairy, fairies, etc.
• Inktomi says that you should include up to 25 words or phrases, with each word or phrase separated by commas.

Few search engines now support meta keywords. For those that do, it might help improve the ranking of your page. It also may very well do nothing for your page at all. In fact, repeating a particular word too often in a keywords meta tag and you could actually harm your page's chances of ranking well.

What are keywords

Keywords are words on a web page that tell a user something about the subject and content of the page. Some search engines will determine the keywords through the meta tag, while others will pull out and index words that appear to be significant from the content . Since engines are software programs, they work according to rules established by their creators for what words are usually important in a broad range of documents. Words that are mentioned towards the beginning of a document or words that are repeated several times throughout the document are given more weight by most search engines.

Some search engines index every word on every page. Others index only part of the document.  Full-text indexing systems generally pick up every word in the text except commonly occurring words such as: a, an, the, is, and, or.  Some search engines discriminate upper case from lower case and for some the case doesn't matter.

Determining Keywords for search engines that support it

The keywords meta tag is sometimes useful as a way to reinforce the terms you think are important. For instance, if you had a page about hot stone massage -- AND you say the words “hot stone massage” at various places in your body copy -- then mentioning the words "hot stone massage" in the keywords meta tag MIGHT help boost your page a bit higher for those words.

If you don't use the words "hot stone massage" 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 works in conjunction with the text in your body copy.

The keyword meta 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 on reiki. You never actually say the word "healing" on this page. By having the word, healing, in your keywords meta tag, then you may help increase the odds of coming up if someone searched for "reiki healing." Of course you would greater increase the odds if you just used the word "healing" in the body copy of the page itself.

Determining keywords for your content

Search engines that don't support the meta tag keywords will look for keywords in the body of your content in order to index your site. Therefore you do need to think carefully when writing content for your pages.

• Think about what the page is all about.
• Which of the words that appear in the document describe the contents of the page accurately?
• What kind of words or phrases would someone use if he was using a search engine and trying to find documents like this?
• Create a list with the answers to the above questions. Repeat this process for every page on your site.
• You should be able to create an individual, distinct list of keywords for each page.
• Select one or two medium-popular keywords or phrases per page and a few less common phrases and words into the body text to help the page come up on some obscure multi-word searches.

Use a keyword suggestion tool

You can then use a keyword suggestion tool, such as Yahoo's (Overture). Type in the different keywords and phrases you've come up with. The tool will tell you how many times each keyword and each phrase was searched only at Overture (not the other search engines) during the last month.

As Yahoo's data is not always 100% accurate you may also want to visit WordTracker. The service is not free, but the trial option offers a chance to search for good keywords during the trial period.

Modify list and insert into content

If some of the words you were planning to select aren't commonly used in searches, you might want to consider dropping them from your list. If other words look like they are used quite a lot, then it might be a good idea to consider adding them.

Robots Meta Tag

The Robots Meta Tag 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:

• < META name="robots" content="noindex">
• < META name="robots" content="nofollow">

Other Meta Tags

There are many other meta tags that exist but mean nothing to web-wide crawlers such as Google.

• <META name="copyright" content="copyright statement" >
• Relates the copyright statement of the website.
• <META name="revisit-after" content="15 days" >
• automatically tells the search engines to return. However, the major search engines have never supported it. This one is supported by SearchBC.
• <META NAME="AUTHOR" CONTENT="your name" >
• Description of the author of the website
• <META HTTP-EQUIV="CONTENT-LANGUAGE" CONTENT="en-US,fr" >
• Declares the primary natural language(s) of the document. May be used by search engines to categorize by language.

Software to Help Create Meta Tags

• A meta tag builder

Google

As Google is such an important and complex search engine, some explanation is necessary on how they rank websites. For a more complete description see Google Technology.

Google does not manually assign keywords to sites, nor do they manually "boost" the rankings of any site. Google has developed its own method of ranking searches. The process is completely automated and takes into account more than 100 factors to determine the relevance of each result.

PageRank™

Traditional search engines rely heavily on how often a word appears on a web page. Google uses PageRank™ to examine the entire link structure of the web and determine which pages are most important. PageRank™ measures the importance of web pages by solving an equation of more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms.

Hypertext-Matching Analysis

It then conducts an hypertext-matching analysis to determine which pages are relevant to the specific search being conducted by analyzing page content. Instead of simply scanning for page-based text, Google's technology analyzes the full content of a page and factors in fonts, subdivisions and the precise location of each word. Google also analyzes the content of neighboring web pages to ensure the results returned are the most relevant to a user's query.