Meta Tags

What are meta tags?

The Meta tag in html is not a required tag when you’re creating your web pages, many pages don’t use the tag at all. To put it briefly, the meta tag is used by search engines to allow them to more accurately list your site in their indexes. Sometimes.

If you simply produce your home page and register the URL with a search engine, or a number of search engines, their spider programmes will (eventually) toddle along to your site to index it. Now, each of the search engines does this slightly differently. Altavista for example will grab everything in your document and index it, but will only show the first 250 characters in its meta description. Consequently, if your site included say, ‘Thanks to:….’ right at the beginning, this is what Altavista would show in its description, and it wouldn’t give the viewer any idea of what your site actually covered. Of course, not all search engines work this way. We’d suggest you ferret around a little bit to see exactly how the popular engines work, and certainly the major two or three such as Google, Altavista, Lycos, Yahoo, Infoseek and Excite. It therefore makes sense to ensure that your opening paragraph is carefully written to ensure it accurately reflects what your site covers.

However, you may be able to exert a certain amount of control over how your site is indexed by the use of the meta tag. Here SEO101 should however point out that not all search engines use this tags - Altavista does, but Excite doesn’t, for example. Its not a total cure-all therefore, but you won’t miss out by putting the tag in, and it may well work well in some cases.

What does a meta tag look like?

You should insert the meta tags 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”>

but note that you don’t have to have a </META> at the end of the tag, the way that you do with something like <BOLD> bold </BOLD>. However, make sure that each tag does not include any line breaks, since some search engines get a little bit tetchy about this.

What can I include in a meta tag?

There are basically four major meta tags that you can use:

1. <META name=”resource-type” content=”document”>
   The only resource type that is currently in use is “document” This is the only tag that you need to put in for indexing purposes, but use of the others is a good idea.
2. <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. “content” could be a word, sentence or even paragraph to describe your page. Keep this reasonably short, concise and to the point. However, don’t be so mean with your description that its not an appropriate reflection of the contents!
3. <META name=”keywords” content=”a, list, of, keywords”>
   Choose whatever keywords you think are appropriate, seperated by commas. Remember to include synonyms, americanisms and so on. So, if you had a page on cars, you might want to include keywords such as car, cars, vehicles, automobiles and so on.
4. <META name=”distribution” content=”one of several”>
   Content should contain either global, local or iu (for Internal Use). We suggest you to read this article about Local Search and how it works. You will get a pretty good idea of what does local or global search does.

Are there optional tags?

Yes, theres a whole bunch of ‘em. We’ve put in a couple of examples below:

1. <META name=”copyright” content=”copyright statement”>
   Pretty obvious what this one’s for. It contains information about the copyright owner and a copyright statement.
2. <META HTTP-EQUIV=”varname” content=”data”>
   This binds the varname to an HTTP header field. An http server might use this to process a document. This one’s a tad more tricky. If you included the following example:<META HTTP-EQUIV=”keywords” content=”car,cars”>then, as part of a GET command the server would include the word car and cars in the HTTP response header.
3. <META HTTP-EQUIV=”refresh” content=”0; url=homepage.htm”>
   This can be used in the HEAD section of the index.html file to redirect it to homepage.htm. The figure after content is the time in seconds that the browser waits before moving on.

There are a few others that you can include, such as “revisit-after” and “rating” if you want to be really comprehensive.

Other useful points

• The description tag should not simply restate the title of the page, it should describe the page and content.
• The meta tag can also be used in the creation of dynamic documents.

Meta Tags FAQ

Can I put my competitors name(s) in my meta tags?

Sounds like a good idea when you first think of it doesn’t it?
Well, if you put your competitors names in your meta tags, and someone searches for them, they may find you instead and buy a product from you, rather than them. Unfortunately, life isn’t that simple. In many countries like UK, where copyright laws are more strict, there are laws against passing yourself off as another company - you wouldn’t get very far if you tried to open a shop called Harrods, for example. You’ll find that putting in meta tags is probably going to be regarded in exactly the same way by the British courts. (Please bear in mind here that we’re not group of lawyers, and not giving legal advice; this is just our opinion. There might be consequences.)

SEO101 suspect that you’ll find the same thing in other countries around the world, and you’ll end up in a whole bunch of trouble if you try and do it. Of course, there is nothing to stop you stressing the products themselves that you sell, in common with that of your competitors, in your meta tags and you may find that this works rather better than putting in their names anyway!

Should I use commas or not?

Some people say we do, some people don’t. But SEO101 suggests you to use it if it is necessary. You wouldn’t find any contradictions about using commas in meta keyword tag but if you think your meta description will be more meaningful with use of commas or full stops, we recommend you to use them as SEO101 never find any bad results or wrong review for using commas.

Should I put meta tags on every page, or just meta tags on the home or index page?

Put them on every page that you create and publish. Search engines will find all your pages if you have created good internal page linking or you have a sitemap and if you want to stand a good chance of them ranking your pages highly, you’ll want to put the meta tag element on each of them. You don’t need to use same keywords and meta description on all pages, they can differ from page to page according to your article content.

Can I write and ask you questions about meta tags?

Sure! If SEO101 can answer them for you we’d be happy to make your doubts clear.

Tags: SEO, SEO101, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine, Search Engine Submission, Search Engine Marketing, Keywords, Keyword Search, Link Popularity, Header, Header Tags, Keyword Frequency, Meta Tags, Meta Keyword Tag, Meta Description Tag