Website Design Resources - How to Use Meta Tags
Web Site Design Resources: Tips on the basic principles of good website design.
Meta Tags: How To Use Meta Tags
HTML Meta Tags Explained
Meta Tags contain what is called "metadata," which is information about an html document that is not displayed on a web page but that is "machine parsable," or able to be interpreted by computers. The meta tags are always used within the head element of the html document, and are supported by all of the major internet browsers.
Meta tags are typically used to describe page properties such as description, keywords, copyright information and much more.
Meta Tag Use Misconceptions
Meta keyword tags will NOT put you on the map. Many web design and seo "experts" will claim to optimize your meta tags by stuffing them with keywords and nothing more. The truth is, the significance of the meta keyword tag has declined sharply in the recent past, precisely due to this overstuffing by reckless web masters and spammers trying to drive traffic to their website. In fact, many search engines actually ignore the meta keywords tag altogether.
Meta tags use is NOT only reserved for seo purposes. While the use of meta tags to increase search engine visibility is a must, meta tags are important tools in helping your users determine the relevance of your web page to their needs as well. Many search engines use the content of your meta description tag to provide a snapshot of your web page information in the query results page.
Consider the following example:
A search for "meta tags how to" displays the content of your meta description tags below the title:
A Meta Tags How-To Tutorial"How to use meta tags properly for the creation of search engine friendly web pages."
www.anywebsite.com/meta_tag_use.html
As you can see, proper use of meta tags is critical to helping your potential web site users determine the relevance of your site content to their needs.
Meta Tag Elements
There are numerous meta tag elements that can be used to give your users and the search engines a variety of information about your web pages - the decision as to which ones to use is yours. There are, however, a few meta tag elements we recommend that when used properly are instrumental to the design of a successful, user and robot friendly web site.
Meta Description Tag
As demonatrated in the example above, the meta description tag is crucial to providing a summary of your web page content to both internet users and search engines. The content of the description tag should be relevant to your targeted keywords and consistent with the theme of the page. The text should be limited to about 200 characters.
Meta Robots Tag
The meta robots tag defines the rules for the search bots (the search engine web crawlers) and it's use is important for a few reasons. The robots tag allows you to dictate which pages of your web site are indexed, and whether or not the links on the page should be followed for indexing.
The use of a robots txt file is a better solution because it applies to all the pages of your web site, and only needs to be created once. The use of a robots txt file requires root access to a web site, and when access is not available, the meta robots tag is an effective alternative.
Read more about robots txt file usage on our Google robots page.
Meta keywords Tag
As explained in our "meta tag use misconceptions" discussion above, many search engines give little or no priority to meta keyword tags - although some, such as Yahoo - do. This alone is reason enough for the inclusion of content in the meta keyword tags of your web pages.
A point to remember is that the use of too many keywords should be avoided at all costs as it is considered by several search engines as spamming and will be used against you in the search engine results rankings.
Meta Author Tag & Meta Copyright Tag
The meta author tag is used to denote the author of a web page, and the meta copyright tag clearly defines the owner of the copyright to the design and/or content of the page. As content theft by robots and spammers is becoming increasingly common, these are tags that should not be ommitted and should be used on all pages of a web site.
Other Meta Tags
There are numerous meta tags that can be used to specify a variety of the properties of a web page, including the ability to create custom schema. We have included a few of these meta tags below for your information.
Content-Encoding: This tag defines the content and encoding of the page
<meta http-equiv="content-encoding" />
Content-Length: This tag defines the size of the page
<meta http-equiv="content-length" />
Content-Type: This tag defines the document type (text/html)
<meta http-equiv="content-type" />
Generator: This tag defines the program used to generate the document
<meta name="generator" />
Date: This tag defines the date the document was created
<meta http-equiv="date" />
Rating: This tag defines the website rating assigned to the page
<meta name="rating" />
Location: This tag specifies an absolute url for the web page
<meta http-equiv="location" />
Revisit-After: This tag defines the expected update rate of the web page
<meta name="revisit-after" />
Last-Modified: This tag defines the date the page was last modified
<meta http-equiv="last-modified" />
Set-Cookie: This tag defines a cookie value
<meta http-equiv="set-cookie" />
Refresh: This tag defines a time interval for the web page to refresh itself
<meta http-equiv="refresh" />
The dispelling of meta tag misconceptions and practical meta tags "how to" advice should help get you one step closer to designing a quality web site. But remember, while optimization of the meta tags on your web pages will help generate web traffic, the key to the success of any web site is useful information in the form of quality content.