META tags and SEO
META tags are important HTML tags for providing information about the document. This is not a required tag in a web page, and therefore many developers dont put these tags in the developed web pages. But in most of the search engines these tags are used for listing and indexing the sites accurately. Google, Altavista, etc. search for the META tahs in the document to categorise that document.
Where to put META tags?
META tags should be placed in the HEAD section of an HTML page:
<html>
<head>
<meta name=”keywords” content=”keyword1,keyword2″>
<meta name=”description” content=”description is…”>
……..
</head>
<body>
……..
Major META Tags :
<META name=”doc-type” content=”web page”>
this tag indicates document type. Different types of document available are Government, Journal, Private, Public, etc.
<META name=”keywords” content=”a, list, of, keywords”>
this tag contains a list of keywords separated by comma. These are the most important keywords which indicate what information does the web page contain?
<META name=”description” content=”a description of your page”>
this tag contains descritpion about the web page and its contents. this description should short but summarised with main keywords.
<META name=”distribution” content=”global”>
Content should contain either global, local or IU (for Internal Use).
Optional META tags :
<META name=”copyright” content=”copyright statement”>
this meta tag indicates the copyright for the web page.
<META HTTP-EQUIV=”refresh” content=”0; url=index.htm”>
this tag is used widely for reloading the web page after every mentioned seconds in content. Also, here the URL represents to redirect it to index.htm .
<META name=”revisit-after” content=”7 days”>
this tag informs the bot to revisit after 7/14/21 days.
<META name=”author” content=”author’s name”>
this tag contains the name of the author of web page.
There are other meta tags like robots, revisit-after, rating, owner, publisher, etc. which can be used in a web page.
Thus, by META tags optimization web pages can achieve higher rankings in search engines. Now, most of the search engines also crawl your web page contents, so the contents of the web page should be specific and must contain the keywords for number of times. This helps the search engines to index the web pages and thus web pages gain higher rankings.
Outsourcing Hosting Support said,
May 20, 2007 @ 11:30 am
The value of meta keywords is just one of the factors in SE ranking process though I suspect many SE are using it, but it is better to use it.
jc8654 said,
October 1, 2007 @ 11:57 pm
As well as META, how often the content of your site changes, the links to your site and many other factors play a part in SEO. Meta tags are very useful though as they allow consistency in what the search engines display.