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The role of meta tags

Our briefings aren't written for code jockeys - they're for business users. However, there comes a point when even the most techno-phobic business person needs to understand just a little of the technical stuff - if only to avoid having the wool pulled over her/his eyes. Meta tags is one such subject, because many people have a bit of meta tag knowledge - which, as we all know, can be a dangerous thing. Lots of people obsess unnecessarily about meta tags. So let's set the record straight.

What are meta tags?

Meta tags are 'hidden' in the HTML of a Web page and information which is generally not intended for humans. In the case of the meta tags which we're interested in, they are used to convey information to Web browsers and to search engines. Meta provide additional information about a Web page, which might help a browser or search engine to better understand it or better index it. I'll show you some actual examples of meta tags in a minute or two - but there's a few things you need to know first.

Meta tags - so misunderstood

If there's one search engine concept which is more misunderstood than any other, it's that of meta tags. Many people have heard of them (although some people refer to them as 'keywords', which is actually just one of the meta tags available). Most people think that meta tags are magical - and that getting your meta tags 'just right' is the miraculous route to search engine success. It's a tempting thought: you pop a few clever keywords into your home page and - bang! You're instantly top of the Web searches. Not so - in fact, far from it.

The bad news

Before we investigate meta tags in detail, here's the bad news, up front. These days, meta tags play a far, far less important role than they used to. In fact, some search engines don't look at your meta tags at all - and most search engines pay more attention to the actual Web page content, or at least evaluate any meta tags in the context of what they find on the actual Web page. The best result that you can hope from using meta tags is that they provide some influence on how some search engines might display search results related to your Web pages.

The good news

So meta tags aren't worth bothering with, then? Not so. Getting your meta tags right is but the work of a few moments, and, since they are used by some search engines, it is still worth spending some time getting them right. But meta tags have another useful feature: they can stop search engines indexing some pages on your Web site, so that people getting search results only get presented with information about the most relevant pages. For example, why bother letting search engines index your contact form? Or legal notices? Pointless.

Why can't I see meta tags?

Since meta tags primarily contain information which is not intended for humans, they're hidden. So where are they? In Web pages which contain them (hey, they're not mandatory, certainly not for every page) you'll find them right at the top of the HTML code, between the HEAD tags. (To check this out in your browser, do the following. Internet Explorer users, choose 'view, source'. Netscape Navigator users, choose 'view, page source'.)

You should see something which looks like this:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
<title>Labrow Marketing - briefings - search engines - developing a search engine strategy</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
<link href="../../css/labrow.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
</head>

The DOCTYPE should be the first thing in an HTML page. It tells the browser which HTML specification the Web page uses. It's usually put in automatically by whichever software you use to create Web pages.

The HTML tag simply tells the browser that what follows is HTML.

Ah - now here's what we're looking for: the tags between the two HEAD tags.

The TITLE tag

The TITLE tag isn't actually a meta tag at all, but it does live between the HEAD tags. This tag is more important than any meta tag - and it's vital to get it right.

The reason this tag is so important is two-fold:

What you put here is what is displayed in the title bar of the browser when your page is being viewed.
What you put here is what is displayed by search engines when they display search results.

Well, here's a practical exercise for you to try. Fire up a search engine, such as google.co.uk and type in: 'untitled document', and then press return. Ekk! In Google, I got 4,480,000 documents. In fact, it's such a round number, I suspect Google just got maxed out storing these. alltheweb.com, I got 5,826,827 returns. (You may well get different numbers, since the number of these pages will have changed since I wrote this briefing.)

Why do some many Web pages have these titles? Well, 'untitled document' is what most Web page editors insert by default when creating a new Web page. For all of those pages, the editor simply forgot - or didn't bother - to put the page title in. Every one of those pages is a huge lost opportunity, because who searches for 'untitled document'? For the want of a nail, a shoe was lost.

So, if you get nothing else right, get your document title right. Which is why this article covers the TITLE tag in more detail than the 'real' meta tags.

When browsing the Web, you'll also see lots of misleading document titles - perhaps over-long sentences which sell harder than a street-trader, or perhaps lots of keywords. People do this in the mistaken belief that this will advantage them. The best route is to play with a straight bat, because non-standard use of the title tag can lead to a site being barred by a search engine.

My advice: put 'who you are', followed by 'what you do'. (For example: 'The Shoe Shop - the best value shoes, in vibrant colours'.) Use clear language (call a spade a spade) and keep it as short as you can. Separate the two items with a hyphen - this keeps the two pieces of information clearly separate. (A more detailed explanation of this rationale for naming your TITLE tag is explained in the associated briefing: optimising pages for search engines.)

(Note that some browsers - Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator included - also add their own name, in the title bar, after the content of your TITLE tag.)

So, when your Web page title is returned in a Web site search, the link truly represents the page/site content - following one of my key principles for Web page links: promise what you deliver and deliver what you pomise. Also, when people browse to your site, what's in the title bar is more representative of your site. (Remember - you should change this for each page, for example: 'The Shoe Shop - contact us' and 'The Shoe Shop - about us'. Doing this provides an extra hint to site visitors about which page they're on. It also means that if a search engine pulls up dozens of pages from your site, someone looking at the list of links can see what's different about each page.
Finally, it helps people when they bookmark pages on your site - they can come back that bookmark weeks later and easily tell where it will take them.

The TITLE tag is vital for search engines. What you put in the title tag is one of the most important ways that a search engine will rank your Web page. Not having the right target keywords in your title bar is a primary reason that many Web pages are ranked low by search engines, even though the content of the page is actually relevant to the search! (Keywords are something you should build into your site at many levels, you can find out more about doing this in the associated briefing: writing search-engine friendly copy.)

Meta HTTP-EQUIV

This tag provides useful information to the browser, to help it display the Web page. It's not used by search engines, so we'll cheerfully ignore it here.

Meta name="description"

So far, this briefing has been like Hamlet without the Prince. But now - at last - a meta tag intended for search engines.

As you'd expect, you use this tag to present to search engines a description of your Web page. Ideally, search engines would display the content of this tag as part of their search results. Sadly, although some search engines use this tag to some extent (for example, AltaVista, FAST and Teoma seem to use it the most) many don't. If this tag exists, for the most part Google seems to use it, otherwise it generates its own 'description' by extracting the most likely statement from within the Web page itself.

This might seem annoying, but it's come about because so many people have abused the intended use of meta tags, by packing them full of non-relevant information - usually in order to try to get to the top of the search engine ranking and boost their traffic. Search engine technology has had to evolve to cope with this, in order to present relevant information to users.

It's worth using the meta description tag, because some search engines do use it, especially Google. The easy (and most often used) solution is to copy the first couple of sentences from your Web page into the tag - and this often works fine - though It's far better to ensure that the description also includes keywords relevant to that page.

Your description should be as short as it possibly can - bear in mind that search engines only display the first few words (the number of words differs from search engine to search engine). I recommend a maximum of fifty words (200/300 characters); thirty words is better - and make the first 15/20 count the most.

Meta name="keywords"

Of all the meta tags, this is the most over-rated. Why? Because most search engines simply ignore it.

Why is it ignored? Simple, for the reason outlined above: it's been abused for too long by people using non-relevant keywords in an attempt to boost rankings. Search engines have abandoned indexing this tab in favour of indexing the page's title and content.

But it's still good practice to use this tag, because some search engines still support it - but keep your expectations low. In fact, now you've lowered them, lower them again. And again. That's better.

You should use keywords to reinforce words you've already got on the page. There's no point in using keywords that don't appear on the page, because even the search engines that support this tag index meta keywords in the context of your page's context. (If a meta keyword isn't already on your page, it has little or no value.) What keywords can do - but only slightly - is to help improve your search engine rankings for those specific words, if those words already appear on the page.

Lots of professional Web developers no longer bother with keywords, except perhaps for a site's home page.

How many keywords should you use? Not too many - having too many keywords can lead to search engines penalising your site, because it looks like you're using them inappropriately (this only applies to the engines which use keywords, of course). Constantly repeated keywords should not be used, for the same reason. I recommend 20/25 key words or phrases (you should separate these with commas) or preferably less. But for the time it takes, your effort is probably better spend fine-tuning the content of your Web pages to include intelligent wording that will result in better search-engine rankings.

ROBOTS

One tag not shown in our example above is the ROBOTS tag. This tag is supported by most search engines and is well worth using. However, it's (rather perversely) best used to tell search engines what not to look at! You add this tag (like the others) between the HEAD tags.

This is what it looks like:

This tag says to search engines: 'don't bother indexing this page'. There are lots of pages you might not want indexing (like your enquiry form, legal notices and so on) and this is a great way to do it. After all, you want search engine results to be relevant.

You can also tell search engines not to follow any links on a page - that is, to halt indexing after that page. This looks like this:

The smart ones of you out there will have realised that you can use 'index, follow' in this tag - but it's pointless. Search engines are going to do it anyway. You use this tag to halt a search engine, although an acceptable variant is:

The ROBOTS.TXT file

There's another way of halting search engines, without using meta tags, which is to include a ROBOTS.TXT file in the root of your site. This is a simple text file, which is structured as follows:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /contact/
Disallow: /legal/

The structure is pretty self-explanatory, with folders that you don't want indexing highlighted using the 'disallow' statement.

The advantage of using a ROBOTS.TXT file is obvious - you need only do the job once. If you use a ROBOTS.TXT file you don't need to use the meta robots tag in your Web pages.

Other meta tags

A quick search through the code in other Web pages reveals that there are other meta tags in use, such as 'author, 'generator' and date. Forget these: search engines don't use them.

Conclusion

Many people have a misplaced level of trust in meta tags. The best meta tags are useful and nothing more. But if you're wanting to get the most from these and get search engines to index your site properly, then follow these guidelines:

Use the title tag without fail.
Use the meta description tag, it's well-supported enough to make the effort worth it.
Don't bother with meta keywords except for the home page, or to fine-tune a page. Don't put much faith in meta keywords.
Use the ROBOTS tag to halt indexing to ensure that only relevant pages are indexed on your sites.
Other meta tags have no value for search engines - search engines ignore them.

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