META tags are a way for you to define your web page and web
site to the outside world. You can declare the keywords and
description, which help your placement in search engines.
In addition, you can specify who owns the copyright, how
often the page is to be visited by search engines and many
other useful pieces of information.
Please understand that META tags are just notes, little
snippets of information that you chose to put into a page,
for informational purposes. META tags are not necessarily
recognized by search engines as vehicles for ranking, although
some still do read them and use them. Also, search engines
(especially Google) constantly change their views on META
tags and constantly make decisions whether to even read them,
or totally disregard them.
Important side note: Many make the mistake of putting the
TITLE tag into the META category. Folks, the TITLE tag is
not a META tag, but a crucial element of every web page.
If your page does not have a title, it becomes one of the
30 million meaningless Untitled Documents.
So are there any tags that make a difference in terms of
search engine placement?
The misuse of META tags was the main reason for which search
engines do not rely on them so heavily any more. Unscrupulous
webmasters used META tags to mislead the search, in order
to artificially inflate the number of visitors. In the past,
META tag optimization was the key-point in any search engine
optimization strategy. Today, other factors (like link popularity)
are far more important. Many SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
gurus tell you not to ever again bother with META tags, totally
forget they ever existed and focus on links.
My personal opinion is, if it matters only 0.05%, then why
not use them, since it's just a simple "type and forget" deal
anyway and does not require that much work? Similarly to
the stock market and investing strategies, a tiny 0.05% can
actually help in the long run. In today's competitive internet,
where your site is just one out of billions, every bit helps.
Several Web search engines, such as InfoSeek and AltaVista,
still recognize META elements with NAME values "description" and "keywords".
The words listed in a "keywords" tag might be used (and perhaps
emphasized) when indexing documents. However, generally such
keywords are useful only if they occur in the normal text
of the document too, and in that case you can expect the
keywords extracted from your page's text to be used in indexing
anyway!
This is exactly why, you will see an increasing amount of
SEO community folks telling you to stop even thinking that
the "keywords" tag ever existed.
I am more of a conservative nature when it comes to SEO
and my philosophy is that whatever page element is not known
for sure to penalize your search engine ranking, should be
left, just in case things change, or even just for some smaller
and less important or known search engines (the entire world
seems to be concerned solely with Google today) might actually
help you in the long run. Basically, all I'm saying is don't
put all your eggs in one basket.
Keywords are separated by commas and may be considered case
sensitive by search engines. If the same keywords are repeated
too often in the META element, some search engines will not
index the document. Search engines typically only process
the first 1000 characters of the keywords list. So, if you
use keywords, do it carefully, as this is one element that
can actually get you penalized.
On the other hand, a "description" tag should be used, since
many (but not all) search engines show this info as the abstract
for the document when returning query results. But you should
also take into account that many search engines just take
the first few words of the document, so you might include
a short summary into the document body right after the main
heading.
To avoid being truncated (that is, cut) by search engines,
the description should be brief - no more than 200 characters.
Let's clear one more common confusion: The META tags affect
the way your document is indexed when it is included into
a data base of a search engine. However, it will not make
a robot find the document when it searches candidates for
inclusion into a data base. Therefore, if you think the document
is important, and especially if there are not several links
to it in other documents, consider submitting those pages
to the search engines manually.
When I first started studying META tags and took a closer
look, my first question was why some pages use the META NAME
format, while others use META HTTP-EQUIV for the same stuff.
Here is the technical explanation of the difference between
the two formats. Afterwards, I'll try to translate this into
English.
Begin technical explanation:
The difference between NAME and HTTP-EQUIV is that the latter
has a special significance when documents are retrieved via
HTTP, whereas the interpretation of NAME attributes is up
to each particular browser or other program which processes
HTML files (although some common practices may emerge and
might be standardized later). HTTP servers may use the property
name specified by the HTTP-EQUIV attribute to create an RFC
822 style header in the HTTP response. (RFC 822 is the electronic
mail protocol used on the Internet.) The header name (which
is case insensitive) is taken from the HTTP-EQUIV attribute
value, and the header value is taken from the value of the
content attribute.
The HTTP-EQUIV attribute may be used in place of the NAME
attribute to indicate that the property is an HTTP header.
Some servers will send the HTTP header specified in the META
element, and browsers often recognize the header even when
it is not sent by the server.
Note: While HTTP-EQUIV META tag appears to work properly
with some browsers, other browsers may ignore them, and they
are ignored by Web proxies, which are becoming more widespread.
Use of the equivalent HTTP header, as supported by e.g. Apache
server, is more reliable and is recommended wherever possible.
HTTP headers may be generated by CGI scripts, and in Apache
and CERN httpd by using a side file containing metadata.
Other servers may have other mechanisms to generate headers.
Note that certain server-generated headers may not be overridden
(such as Date), and that others are only meaningful with
a non-200 status code. Using an HTTP header is preferable
to using META tags, since the header will be understood by
cache agents and proxies in addition to browsers, and metadata
(such as PICS data) may be associated with image files, sound
files, etc.
End of technical explanation.
Ok, if you read the above and got it, then you should be
building rocket ships or playing with nanobots and not be
reading silly articles! For the rest of us, here is a very
basic translation:
The HTTP-EQUIV is for headers sent to your browser by the
server after a request for a page/file has been made. In
plain English, this information may direct/control how your
page will be displayed in a browser.
The NAME attribute is there to provide additional information
about the document (such as keywords, description, author
information, copyright information and so on).
There is still a disagreement between many people about
with which attribute the keywords and the description should
go.
My personal advice is to use both! Be careful, because if
you use a design tool, it will generate the tags only in
one format. In that case, I would just copy the generated
block of info, duplicate it on the page (do it just after
the original, so you don't mess up the page's coding), then
change NAME to HTTP-EQUIV on the duplicates if the originals
were NAME, or HTTP-EQUIV to META, if the originals were HTTP-EQUIV.
Again, you don't get penalized for doing this, and until
the world comes to an agreement, you are covered both ways!
Andrei co-owns bsleek (
http://www.bsleek.com ) – a
site that specializes in web hosting, design, promotional
items, printing, CD Presentations and more. Andrei is on
the Board of Consultants for Daterade.com and has amassed
an extensive technical knowledge and experience through his
career as the CIO for a major travel management company and
through his past careers in military research, data acquisition
and aerospace engineering.
