How To Use HTML Meta Tags
Want to get a top ranking in search engines? No
problem! All you need to do is add a few magical "meta tags" to your web
pages, and you'll skyrocket to the top of the listings.
If only it were so easy. Let's make it clear:
- Meta tags are not a magic solution.
- Meta tags are not a magic solution.
- Meta tags are not a magic solution.
Meta tags have never been a guaranteed way to gain
a top ranking on crawler-based search engines. Today, the most valuable
feature they offer the web site owner is the ability to control to some
degree how their web pages are described by some search engines. They
also offer the ability to prevent pages from being indexed at all. This
page explores these and other meta tag-related features in more depth.
Meta Tag Overview
What are meta tags? They are information inserted
into the "head" area of your web pages. Other than the
title tag (explained below), 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 a
human visitor may not be concerned with. Meta tags, for example, can
tell a browser what "character set" to use or whether a web page has
self-rated itself in terms of adult content.
Let's see two common types of meta tags, then
we'll discuss exactly how they are used in more depth:
In the example above, you can see the beginning of
the page's "head" area as noted by the HEAD tag -- it ends at the
portion shown as /HEAD.
Meta tags go in between the "opening" and
"closing" HEAD tags. Shown in the example is a TITLE tag, then a META
DESCRIPTION tag, then a META KEYWORDS tag. Let's talk about what these
do.
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 (between the TITLE and /TITLE portions as shown in the
example) will appear in the reverse bar of someone's browser when they
view the web page. For instance, within the title tag of this page that
you are reading is this text:
How to Use
HTML Meta Tags
If you look at the reverse bar in your browser,
then you should see that text being used, similar to this:
Some browsers also supplement whatever you put in
the title tag by adding their own name, as you can see Microsoft's
Internet Explorer doing in the picture above.
The title tag is also used as the words to
describe your page when someone adds it to their "Favorites" or
"Bookmarks" lists. For instance, if you added this page to your
Favorites in Internet Explorer, it would show up like this:
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.
For example, this is how Teoma lists the page you
are reading:
You can see that the text "How To Use HTML Meta
Tags" is used as the hyperlinked title of this page's listed in Teoma's
results.
In review, think about the key terms you'd like
your page to be found for in crawler-based search engines, then
incorporate those terms into your title tag in a short, descriptive
fashion. That text will then be used as your title in crawler-based
search engines, as well as the title in bookmarks and in browser reverse
bars.
The Meta
Description Tag
The meta description tag allows you to influence
the description of your page in the crawlers that support the tag (these
are listed on the
Search Engine Features page).
Look back at the example
of a meta tag. See the first meta tag shown, the one that says
"name=description"? That's the meta description tag. The text you want
to be shown as your description goes between the quotation marks after
the "content=" portion of the tag (generally, 200 to 250 characters may
be indexed, though only a smaller portion of this amount may be
displayed).
For this page you are reading, I would like it
described in a search engine's listings like this:
This tutorial
explains how to use HTML meta tags.
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. Others may
support it partially. For instance, let's see again how this page is
listed in Teoma:
You can see that the first portion of the page's
description comes from the meta description tag, then there's an ellipse
(.), and the remaining portion is drawn from the body copy of the page
itself.
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.
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 you? Well, for most major crawlers,
it doesn't. That's because most crawlers now ignore the tag.
The meta keywords tag is sometimes useful
as a way to reinforce the terms you think a page is important for ON THE
FEW CRAWLERS THAT SUPPORT IT. For instance, if you had a page about
stamp collecting -- AND you say the words stamp collecting at various
places in your body copy -- then mentioning the words "stamp collecting"
in the meta keywords tag MIGHT help boost your page a bit higher for
those words.
Remember, if you don't use the words "stamp
collecting" on the page at all, then just adding them to the meta
keywords tag is extremely unlikely to help the page do well for the
term. The text in the meta keywords tag, FOR THE FEW CRAWLERS THAT
SUPPORT IT, works in conjunction with the text in your body copy.
The meta keyword tag is also sometimes useful as a
way to help your page come up for synonyms or unusual words that don't
appear on the page itself. For instance, let's say you had a page all
about the "Penny Black" stamp. You never actually say the word
"collecting" on this page. By having the word in your meta keywords tag,
then you may help increase the odds of coming up if someone searched for
"penny black stamp collecting." Of course you would greater increase the
odds if you just used the word "collecting" in the body copy of the page
itself.
Here's another example. Let's say you have a page
about horseback riding, and you've written your page using "horseback"
as a single word. You realize that some people may instead search for
"horse back riding," with "horse back" in their searches being two
separate words. If you listed these words separately in your meta
keywords tag, THEN MAYBE FOR THE FEW CRAWLERS THAT SUPPORT IT, your page
might rank better for "horse back" riding. Sadly, the best way to ensure
this would be to write your pages using both "horseback riding" and
"horse back riding" in the text -- or perhaps on some of your pages, use
the single word version and on others, the two word version.
I'm using all these capital letters on purpose.
Far too many people new to search engine optimization obsess with the
meta keywords tag. FEW crawlers support it. For those that do, it MIGHT!
MAYBE! PERHAPS! POSSIBLY! BUT WITH NO GUARANTEE! help improve the
ranking of your page. It also may very well do nothing for your page at
all. In fact, repeat a particular word too often in a meta keywords tag
and you could actually harm your page's chances of ranking well. Because
of this, I strongly suggest that those new to search engine optimization
not even worry about the tag at all.
Even those who are experienced in search engine
optimization may decide it is no longer worth using the tags. ManageWare does,
it can't hurt. There's no harm in leaving up existing tags you may have
written.
Still want to use the meta keywords tag? OK. Look
back at the opening example. See the second
meta tag shown, the one that says "name=keywords"? That's the meta
keywords tag. The keywords you want associated with your page go between
the quotation marks after the "content=" portion of the tag.
Inktomi says that you should include up to 25
words or phrases, with each word or phrase separated by commas. More
advice from Inktomi can be found on its
Content Policy FAQ.
FYI, in the past, when the tag was supported by
other search engines, they generally indexed up to 1,000 characters of
text and commas were not required.
Meta Robots
Tag
One other meta tag worth mentioning is the robots tag. This lets you
specify that a particular page should NOT be indexed by a search engine.
To keep spiders out, simply add this text between your head tags on each
page you don't want indexed. The format is shown below (click on the
picture if you want to copy and past the HTML for your own use):
You do NOT need to use variations of the meta robots tag to help your
pages get indexed. They are unnecessary. By default,
a crawler will try to index all your web pages and will try to follow
links from one page to another.
Most major search engines support the meta
robots tag. However, the robots.txt convention
of blocking indexing is more efficient, as you don't
need to add tags to each and every page. If you use do a
robots.txt file to block indexing, there is no
need to also use meta robots tags.
The meta robots tag also has some extensions
offered by particular search engines to prevent indexing of multimedia
content. The article below talks about this in more depth and provides
some links to help files. Search Engine Watch members should follow the
link from the article to the members-only edition for extended help on
the subject.
Other Meta Tags
There are many other meta tags that exist beyond
those explored in this article. For example, if you were to view the
source code of this web page, you would find "author," "channel" and
"date" meta tags. These mean nothing to web-wide crawlers such as Google.
They are specifically for an internal search engine used by Search
Engine Watch to index its own content.
There are also "Dublin Core" meta tags. The intent
is that these can be used for both "internal" search engines and
web-wide ones. However, no major web-wide search engine supports these
tags.
How about the meta revisit tag? This tag is
not recognized by the major search engines as a method of telling them
how often to automatically return. They have never
supported it.
In
Conclusion
Overall, just remember this. Of all
the meta tags you may see out there:
-
Meta Robots: This tag enjoys
full support, but you only need it if you DO NOT want your pages
indexed.
-
Meta Description: This tag
enjoys much support, and it is well worth using.
-
Meta Keywords: This tag is
only supported by some major crawlers.
-
Meta Everything Else: Any
other meta tag you see is ignored by the major crawlers, though they
may be used by specialized search engines.
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