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Website Fundamentals Understanding META Tags
| Understanding META Tags |
| Technology |
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Meta tags are placed inside the <HEAD> section of a web page and among other things, can be used to pass information to the robot sent by a search engine concerning how you would like a particular page on your website to be indexed. Common entries made with Meta tags are for key words and page description. Be advised that not all search engines necessarily follow the instructions provided by Meta tags. Also an important note, since Meta tags have been abused in the past by people entering incorrect information in an attempt to fool the search engines and thereby achieve higher rankings in a site’s search results, some search engines have very significantly downgraded the impact they play, especially with regard to the Meta tag for "key words". In any case, it doesn't hurt to include Meta tags; and if you want to try and control the indexing of a particular page, the "robots" Meta tag entry is pretty much the only tool at your disposal. The information appearing in the "description" Meta tag is usually what will appear in the search results listing when someone searches for your site. Below is an example of what Amazon.com has entered as a description in its home page’s description Meta tag. <meta name="description" content="Online shopping from the earth's biggest selection of books, magazines, music, DVD's, videos, electronics, computers, software, apparel & accessories, shoes, jewelry, tools & hardware, housewares, furniture, sporting goods, beauty & personal care, broadband & dsl, gourmet food & just about anything else." /> When Amazon.com shows up in a results list following a Google search, here is what is displayed. Note that the description in the Meta tag and the description showing up in the Google listing are identical. The point I’m making here is that you should give some thought to what you want appearing as a description for your business in search engine results, and enter this information in the description Meta tag. Amazon.com: Online Shopping for Electronics, Apparel, Computers ...” “Online shopping from the earth's biggest selection of books, magazines, music, dvds, videos, electronics, computers, software, apparel & accessories, shoes, .. Below is an HTML example of a Meta tag entry for providing a search robot with information about key words, description, and indexing instructions.The "noarchive" instruction prevents the search engine from presenting a cached image of your web page to someone searching on your key words. If you have a page on your site that changes frequently, you should use this tag.In the example below, the search engines have been told to index the page, and to follow any links that might appear on this page. <head> <META NAME="robots" CONTENT="noarchive"> The normal default value for the robots meta tag is “index,follow”, so in the absence of a robots tag providing instructions to the contrary, a search robot coming upon this page will add the page to its database, and follow any links that might appear on this page to the linked pages and index them as well (unless another robots meta tag at the linked page provides instructions to the contrary). So it’s apparent at this point that if you want your pages to be indexed by the search engines, your pages should normally omit any use of the robot Meta tag. Or if you use one, it should be “index,follow”.If you want to instruct the search engines not to index a particular page, you can insert the Meta tag <META NAME =”robots” CONTENT=”noindex,nofollow”>. Another robot Meta tag option that might be used is “index, nofollow”. You would use this in a situation where you want the page indexed; but you don’t want the robot to follow any of the links that appear on the page. This would be useful when you have links to external websites and you don't want the search engine to follow them. A better and more precise way to accomplish this, however, is to use a new tag rel="nofollow" in any link on your web page that includes an offsite link reference. For example: <a href="http://www.google.com/local/add" rel="nofollow">Google Maps</a> This code allows a site visitor to link to a page from your website to a page on Google, but prevents the search robot from following the link off your website. All the major search engines currently offer support for this tag. We have just scratched the surface here, so Look for an upcoming tutorial on using Meta tags or your website. |
