By now almost everyone has heard of meta tags. Unfortunately there is a lot of misunderstanding as to what exactly meta tags do and what they don't do.
Far too many people are convinced that all they need to do to get a top search engine ranking is to fill their meta keyword tag with a lot of relevant keywords and like magic, they will get a top ranking. This is far from the reality. First of all, every search engine treats meta tags differently, they recognize different tags, the influence they have on your page ranking varies greatly from one search engine to another. Just filling your meta keyword tag with what you believe are your primary keywords without understanding the relationship of the meta tags to the rest of the page can actually result in your site getting a LOWER ranking than if you never used meta tags to begin with. That's right, on many of the major search engines, meta tags have very little influence. There are NO search engines that decide your ranking based solely on your meta tags and most don't give any weight to your meta keyword tag. I'LL SAY THAT AGAIN. Most don't give any weight to your meta keyword tag. So stop thinking they are the answer. They are one small part of optimizing your page. Having said that, let's look at some general information on meta tags, what they are, what they do and how to use them. Remember, this information is not geared to any specific search engine but rather an overview of what these tags do.
Meta tags do provide a useful way to control your listing in some search engines. On pages that lack text, such as an opening splash screen, meta tags can be helpful. Frames pages can also benefit from meta tags. However, simply including a meta tag is not a guarantee that your page will achieve a high ranking in the various search engines. They do have their purpose, but treat them as an aide and not the ultimate answer for achieving high search engine rankings.
The most important meta tags used for search engine submission are the 'description' and 'keywords' tags. The 'description' tag returns a description of the page for some search engines. Not all search engines will use your meta description tag, some will take the first lines of text from your page and use that as the summary you see in the search engines. The 'keywords' tag provides the search engine various keywords that will be used to index your page. It is only a guide. Putting a keyword in your meta keywords tag doesn't mean that your page will rank high or even rank at all for those words.
What happens to your page if there are no meta tags present in some search engines?
Let's assume you created a page with a title of "Joe's Home Page" and your first few lines of text on the page says "Welcome to Joe's Party!"
Some search engines will return a listing that says "Joe's Home Page" as the title and a description of "Welcome to Joe's Party!"
Maybe this page has content related to selling supplies for birthday parties. Nothing that the search engine found gives any indication of what your page content deals with.
Let's use the meta tags to let the search engine know more about the specifics of your page.
The meta tags go inside the header tags, so that everything looks like this:
<HEAD><TITLE>Joe's Home Page</TITLE>
<META name="description" content="Party supplies, everything you need to know to plan a successful party!">
<META name="keywords" content="party, parties, birthday, planning, clowns">
</HEAD>
In search engines that support the 'descriptions' tag, the search engine will return a listing something like "Joe's Home Page" as the title and a description of "Party supplies, everything you need to know to plan a successful party!"
Do you see that the search listing matches what you entered on the description tag? That's exactly what the 'description' tag is supposed to do.
Now looking at the above, you can see that the title is still a problem, it does not describe in any way what your business does. More on that shortly.
You're probably asking, what about the keywords tag? It 'helps' your page to be shown in the search engine if anyone types in any of your keywords as part of their search criteria. If someone enters the word party into a search engine, the search engine 'may' match one of your keywords in your tag. But don't bet the farm on it.
Here's why. This keyword MUST appear at other places on your page. If the keyword is not present in the actual text of the page, not present in the title of the page, the search engines will often deem this an irrelevant keyword and drop the ranking of your page. If the keyword doesn't appear somewhere on your page, don't place it in your keyword meta tag.
The 'robots' tag is another meta tag that is being used more and more although not all search engines support it. This tag lets you specify that a certain page should not be indexed by a search engine spider. This is the format for using the 'robots' tag:
<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="NOINDEX">
Some other useful meta tags:
<META NAME="copyright" CONTENT="xxxxxx">
<META NAME="rating" CONTENT="general">
<META NAME="Author" CONTENT="xxxxxx">
<META NAME="Content-Language" CONTENT="xxxxxx">
At the very least, make certain you add Meta description and Meta keyword tags to your web pages. They will definitely help you with some search engines. But be careful how you use them. Make certain what you place in these tags relates to your page and actually appears in your pages content.
Advanced Meta Tag Topics
Let's get into a more in depth discussion of meta tags, as there is still a lot of misunderstanding of how they work and what they actually do. There is still a big misconception among many that the key to search engine positioning is stuffing as many keywords into your meta tag as is possible. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Here's fact that you can take to the bank. You can achieve a page 1 #1 ranking in almost ANY major search engine WITHOUT using ANY meta tags whatsoever. It has been done, and is done on a daily basis.
Now that's not to say you can't make good use of the meta tags if you know how best to use them.
For the purpose of this discussion, I'm only going to focus on the meta keyword and description tag as they are the only 2 tags worth mentioning. The use of any other tags is largely a waste of time.
Let's first look at how the specific engines treat meta tags.
Alta Vista: AV indexes both the meta keyword and description tag, there is no special preference given to words in either tag. They are treated no differently than any other text on the page other than the fact it comes early in the document which can be important. AV uses your meta description tag for the description that is returned to searchers. Neither tag is mandatory to achieve a high ranking since they are treated like any other text.
Lycos: Lycos DOES NOT use or index any meta tag information. Lycos simply ignores your meta tags.
Google: Much like Lycos, Google DOES NOT use or index any meta tag information. Google simply ignores your meta tags.
Excite: Excite uses the meta description tag to rerun the description for searches, but it DOES NOT index the tag, so it is of no use in positioning. The meta keyword tag is ignored.
Infoseek: Infoseek does index the meta keyword and description tags. The use of the meta keyword tag can actually do you more harm than good in Infoseek especially if you repeat a keyword more than 3x in the keyword tag. My recommendation: Only use a keyword once in the meta keyword tag for Infoseek and even better yet, don't use the meta keyword tag. DO USE the meta description tag and get your primary keyword in the description early, but only once.
Inktomi: Inktomi supplies results for several engines including Hotbot and MSN search. For Hotbot: Meta keywords can affect your positioning on HotBot. You should use them, however, there is no evidence that repeating them will improve your page's position. Since Hotbot is case sensitive, it is acceptable to use upper and lower case variations, such as cars, Cars and CARS. Most importantly, make sure that you include all of your important relevant keywords in your meta keywords description just once.
MSN search makes no use of either the meta keyword or description tag.
So as you can see, and I'm sure some of you are a little surprised, the use of the meta keyword tag is not all that important except in Hotbot. The meta description tag is more important in that it is used by several search engines for your summary.
Strategy: I do recommend you use both the keyword and description tag if you are optimizing one page for all search engines as those engines that don't use the tags will just ignore them.
Now, let's talk about some concepts.
Alta Vista recommends the use of synonyms in your meta tag. Let's say your main keyword is 'cars' and that is what is in your TITLE tag. For Altavista their recommended approach would be to create your meta tags so they look something like this:
<Meta name="keywords" content="automobiles, autos, ford, chevrolet, chrysler, ..., ..., ...">
You see, I am using words that are all very related to the main term cars, without using the term cars in the keyword tag itself. This helps develop the all important theme that is so important in Alta Vista today. Quite simply, if your page topic is all over the place, you won't rank in Alta Vista.
Let's look at ways to use meta tags for other search engines. Here's an actual meta tag from a page I recently did for a client.
<META NAME="keywords" content="public records, search, usa, research, canada, united states, washington, oregon, california, montana, idaho, utah, nevada, arizona, public records, wyoming, colorado, new mexico, north dakota, south dakota, nebraska, kansas, records, oklahoma, texas, minnesota, iowa, missouri, arkansas, louisiana, mississippi, tennessee, kentucky, illinois, wisconsin, florida, georgia, south carolina, north carolina, virginia, west virginia, maryland, indiana, michigan, ohio, pennsylvania, delaware, new york, new jersey, connecticut, rhode island, massachusets, new york, vermont, new hampshire, maine">
If the main term for the site is public records, adding single words that may be added to the primary search phrase near the beginning of the page allows the search engines to return results for more than your primary phrase. You wouldn't want to place text like that which is in the meta tag above on your page, it would be meaningless and just a bunch of words, but by placing words in the meta tag that have a direct search relationship to your primary phrase, greatly increases the chances of returning a match. If someone were to search for public records arizona, public records being the main phrase, an engine that uses meta keyword tags will see arizona near the top of the page and index it accordingly. This is how you optimize a page for more than 1 keyword. You don't want to use the phrase public records within every possible combination, this would just be spamming and throw your keyword density so far off that you would have no chance of getting any kind of decent ranking.
This is just part of optimizing web page, but very misunderstood part. Keep in mind like I said in the beginning, for the most part, search engines that index the meta tags treat them no differently than any other text on your page.
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