Meta Tags are HTML tags that provide information that describes the content of the web pages that the visitor will be viewing. Meta tags are used to provide structured metadata about a web page. Such elements must be placed as tags in the head section (i.e. between "<head>" and "</head>" tags) of an HTML or XHTML document. Meta elements can be used to specify page description, keywords and any other metadata not provided through the other head elements and attributes.
Meta's name attribute provides a property name while the content attribute gives the corresponding value. The value inside content attribute may contain text and entities, but no HTML tags.
Statistics show that only few search enginse use Meta tags. However using these tags can give your site an fair advantage over lots of other sites with which your site is competing against. Meta tags enable most visitors to initially find your site through the search engines.
Major search engine robots are more likely to analyze various factors such as the volume of incoming links from related websites, quantity and quality of content, technical precision of source code, spelling, functional vs. broken hyperlinks, page views, revisits, click-throughs, uniqueness, relevance, language and so on. But still Meta-tags are considered as an important tool for successful search engine promotion.
Placement of the Meta Tags
They should be placed in between the <head> and </head> tags in your html page. Generally its placed below or next to<title>......</title> inside head tags.Types of Meta Tags
There is no standard list of Meta tag types so far but here are some of the Meta tags which are in existence.- Keywords Tag*
Keywords are the words people will type in to a search engine.
Tag format: <meta name="keywords" content="put your keywords separated by commas or space here" />
eg. <meta name="keywords" content="increase site traffic,boomarking sites,social networking, traffic exchange" />
- Description Tag*
It is a short summary of the content of the page.
Tag format: <meta name="description" content="describe your website here" />
eg. <meta name="description" content="This site provides lots of articles on how to increase your site traffic" />
- Robots Tag*
The robots attribute is used to control whether search engine spiders are allowed to index a page, or not, and whether they should follow links from a page, or not.
Tags: <meta name="robots" content="all" />
<meta name="robots" content="none" />
<meta name="robots" content="index, follow" />
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow" /> etc.
- Content-Language
This tag lets you to declare the primary language(s) of your webpages which helps search engines to categorize by language.
Tag format: <meta name="content-language" content="set your primary language" />
eg. <meta name="content-language" content="en-US" />
- Content-Type
This is a typical use of the meta element which is used to specify the document type so that a client (browser or otherwise) knows what content type it is expected to render.
Tags: <meta name="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html" /> etc.
- Refresh Tag
This tag lets your page automatically refresh itself to the most current version, or change to another page or alternative url entirely after a set number of seconds.
Tag format: <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="5; url=newurl.html" />
eg. <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="5; url=increaseyoursitetraffic.blogspot.com" />
The page refreshes after 5 seconds if the location of the url & web page is same or redirects to the location of specified url if it is different.
- Expires Tag
This tag lets search engines know that the particular page or site no longer exist after the mentioned date and should not be indexed or made available after that date.
Tag format: <meta name="expires" content="set the deadline" />
eg. <meta name="expires" content="28 Dec 2007 11:59:59 GMT" />
- Author Tag
It is used to provide the name of the author.
Tag format : <Meta name="author" content="put author's name here" />
eg. <Meta name="author" content="Raul Shrestha" /gt;
- Copyright Tag
It is used to provide copyright statement.
Tag format: <Meta name="copyright" content="© put individual/company holding the rights" />
eg. <Meta name="copyright" content="© 2007 Raul Shrestha" />
** "http-equiv" attribute can be used in place of "name" attribute to indicate that the property should be treated as an HTTP header.
*** Just change the italic words inside inverted commas following "content=" without altering rest between less than(<) and greater than sign.(>) Forward slash(/) before greater than (>) at the end is not compulsory but since the Meta tag doesn't have closing Meta tag ending with "/" is recommended. Those blogging in ".blogspot" domain are not allowed to end Meta tag without "/" before greater than sign.
Some Important Meta Tags
Even though there are several type of Meta tags, all of them are not so important. You don't have to use all of the Meta tags listed above. Those Meta tags which are most important has been discussed below.The keywords tag
The keywords attribute was initially popularized by search engines such as Infoseek and AltaVista and its popularity quickly grew until it became one of the most commonly used meta elements. However, search engine providers later realized that information stored in meta elements was often unreliable and misleading and are mostly used to draw users into spam sites. These days most of the search engines have stopped using the information within Meta Keywords tag. But still some of the experts think its use is beneficial and does no harm.It is still a matter of a debate whether or not the keywords attribute has any impact on ranking at any of the major search engine today. It is speculated that it does, if the keywords used in the meta can also be found in the page copy itself. During the selection of keywords for the meta-tag keywords attribute, you should select keywords that accurately reflect the content of the Web page. If a word appears in your keyword meta-tags that does not appear in your main body content, then your Web page will very likely be penalized from the search engines for spamming or even possibly get your Web site permanently removed from the search engine databases.Example:
Tag format:<meta name="keywords" content="put your keywords here" />Tag sample: <meta name="keywords" content="increase site traffic,boomarking sites,social networking, traffic exchange" />
Things to remember while building keyword meta tags
- Each search engine has its own limit to the number of words/characters in keyword list. You can put as many words as you want but it is better not to exceed 25-30 words. Because many search engines regard excessive keywords as spam and delete the webpage from their indexes.
- It makes no difference to the search engines that you use commas or spaces to separate your keywords and keyword phrases. Although it is not necessary to separate your keywords by commas, using commas to separate important phrases is highly recommended. Uses of key phrases instead of single words such as use of "social bookmarking" instead of separating "social" and "bookmarking" increases your chances because it reduces the volume of websites you are competing against.
- You should not repeat a particular keyword many times. Two or three repetitions are sometimes (remember only sometimes) acceptable but excessive repetitions is regarded as spam. And you can be penalized by the search engines.
- Some words (can end up as your keywords) are misspelled commonly and you might be thinking to put such words in your keyword meta-tags. But if such word does not happen to appear in your main body text, its totally useless. Further it can be considered as spam.
- If your site is completely new in the race then you should use some key phrases (totally related to your page) which other sites has ignored so far. It can guarantee you a top spot in the search and hence you get some decent traffic.
- Selection of keywords is very important. Think of those words which you could have used if you were looking for a page similar to yours.
Description tag
The description tag is a short summary of the content of your web page. It should be written in such way that it will show what your website is all about. Write short and clear sentences of less than 200 characters. This allows the webpage authors to give a more meaningful description for listings than might be displayed if the search engine was to automatically create its own description based on the page content. The information inside the description tag is supported by most of the major search engines available today.Search engines that support Meta tags will often display the Description Meta tag along with your title in their results so it can impact click-through rates. Don't mess up your Description Meta tag with putting all the keywords you used in the Keywords Meta tag instead of providing a concise explanation of your web page's conent.Example:
Tag format: <meta name="description" content="describe your website here" /> Tag sample: <meta name="description" content="This site provides lots of articles on how to increase your site traffic" />Robots tag
Most search engines by default assume that you want your web page to be indexed. But the content of the Robots Meta tag helps you to control whether search engine spiders are allowed to index a page, or not, and whether they should follow links from a page, or not. Robots Meta tag is supported by most of the search engines. Search engines like Google, Yahoo!, MSN also have some additional values such as NOARCHIVE, NOSNIPPET, NOODP, NOYDIR. Eventhough you use Robots Meta tag, if you are also using robots.txt search engines first considers robots.txt values and then only Robots Meta tag.Example:
Tag format & some samples:<meta name="robots" content="all" /> <meta name="robots" content="index,nofollow" /> <meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow" /> <meta name="robots" content="none" />- Index: search engine robots should include this page.
- Follow: robots should follow links from this page to other pages.
- NoIndex: links can be explored, although the page is not indexed.
- NoFollow: the page can be indexed, but no links are explored.
- None: robots can ignore the page.
- Index, Follow - The search engine robots will start crawling your website from the main/index page and then will continue to the rest of the pages.
- Index, NoFollow - The search engine robots will start crawling your website from the main/index page and then will NOT continue to the rest of the pages.
- NoIndex, Follow - The search engine robots will skip the main/index page, but will crawl the rest of the pages.
- NoIndex, NoFollow - None of your pages will be crawled by the robot and your website will not be indexes by the search engines.
Check your meta tags
Here are sites where you can analyze your meta tags and receive tips on how to improve your Meta Tags. Submit Express Meta CheckerGenerate meta tags for your site
If you still don't have any idea about how to build meta tags for your site then here are few sites which can do it for you. Put required information and it will generate the meta tags. You just have to copy and paste it at the right place in your webpage. Add Me Submit Corner Submit Express Vancouver-WebpagesFor further reading
Google Search Engine Positioning Tips http://www.thesitewizard.com/archive/google.shtml
Alta Vista Search Engine Placement Tips http://www.thesitewizard.com/archive/altavistaranking.shtml
Death Of A Meta Tag SearchEngineWatch.com
Meta Tag Meta element from Wikipedia
A Dictionary of HTML META Tags http://vancouver-webpages.com
