META Tags Explained!

June 5th, 2007

Meta Tag Overview

What are meta tags? It’s a piece of information inserted into the “head” area of your web pages. Other than the title tag, information in the head area of your web pages is not seen by those viewing your pages in browsers. Instead, meta information in this area is used to communicate information that visitors may not be concerned with.

The Title Tag

The HTML title tag isn’t really a meta tag, but it’s worth discussing in relation to them. Whatever text you place in the title tag will appear in the reverse bar “Title Bar” of someone’s browser when they view the web page. But what about search engines! The title tag is crucial for them. The text you use in the title tag is one of the most important factors in how a search engine may decide to rank your web page. In addition, all major crawlers will use the text of your title tag as the text they use for the title of your page in your listings.

Example:

<title>What are META Tags & How to use it</title>

The Meta Description Tag

The meta description tag allows you to influence the description of your page in the crawlers that support the tag. generally, 200 to 250 characters may be indexed, though only a smaller portion of this amount may be displayed. But will this happen? Not with every search engine!. For example, Google ignores the meta description tag and instead will automatically generate its own description for this page. but if the tag is present, it will just use whatever is in it. Others may support it partially.

In review, it is worthwhile to use the meta description tag for your pages, because it gives you some degree of control with various crawlers. An easy way to do this often is to take the first sentence or two of body copy from your web page and use that for the meta description content.

Example:

<meta name=”description” content=” Your page description or CMS Excerpt comes here”/>

The Meta Keywords Tag

The meta keywords tag allows you to provide additional text for crawler-based search engines to index along with your body copy. How does this help? Well, for most major crawlers, it doesn’t. That’s because most crawlers now ignore the tag. BUT There’s no harm in leaving it up!

Example:

<meta name=”keywords” content=”Your selected Keywords or CMS Tags comes here” />

Anyways, Inserting keywords in this tag without having the keyword listed once or more withing the page content will not be useful for those who still uses the keywords META. So used keywords should be relevant to the page content and not just a list of favorite keywords… well it doesn’t work this ways.

Meta Robots Tag

One other meta tag worth mentioning is the robots tag. This lets you specify whether a particular page should or should NOT be indexed by a search engine. To control spiders, simply add any of the below examples.

Examples of common cases:

To index a page but to follow the links within use: <meta name=”robots” content=”NOINDEX”/> or <meta name=”robots” content=”NOINDEX, FOLLOW”/>
To follow links and not to index the page use: <meta name=”robots” content=”NOINDEX, FOLLOW”/>
To not to index and not to follow the links in a page use: <meta name=”robots” content=”NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW”/> or <meta name=”robots” content=”NONE”/>
To index and follow links use: <meta name=”robots” content=”INDEX,FOLLOW”/> or <meta name=”robots” content=”ALL”/>

In a general case, it is recommended to index and follow most of the pages, for that we use <meta name=”robots” content=”ALL”/> by default. Now in pages with common functionalities like “email to friend” and “print this page” or any similar pages that are not required to be indexed or that we don’t want it to be indexed, you have to use <meta name=”robots” content=”NONE”/>

Meta Author Tag

This tag is useful for author contact information and it is ignored by MOST search engines… it is meant to introduce some information on the page author to the visitor like contacts address or email address or any useful info. note that some search engine bots “SPAM bots” uses the email address listed for SPAM purposes! therefore it is not recommended to use an email address here, author or company name would be more than enough.

Example:

<meta name=”author” content=”Iyad Tibi” />

Meta Copyright Tag

This tag is not meant to represent an official copyright statement, but can list some copyright info related to the page content like Source and year.

Example:

There are still more Meta Tags to learn about the usage and importance, You can have a further reading at www.webmarketingnow.com/tips/meta-tags-uncovered.html

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