How to Use META Tags
The first step in planning a web promotion strategy
by Christopher Simmons
Here are four basic facts about using META tags:
Do you need to worry about META tags? Answer: Yes, you do.
Will you get a top-ten ranking by putting META tags in your HTML, and using a search engine submission service (such as DotComMojo.com)? Answer: Possibly, but not likely.
Are META tags easy to use? Answer: Yes, and no.
Why do I need to use them? Answer: Because more than 30% of all search engines require them for your site to be listed at all.
The Basics of using META tags
The concept behind META tags is that they can be used in the <HEAD> </HEAD> tags of an HTML document to describe information that can be read based on certain criteria. The effectiveness of this varies widely because numerous possible tags can be used, but not all indexes use every tag.
The most popular tags can include information such as DESCRIPTION, KEYWORDS, and other information such as COPYRIGHT, AUTHOR, and LANGUAGE. Other tags can direct search engine robots to either ignore page links, follow them, and some now disallow indexing images on your Web page. Additional tags may be used by internal indexing and/or content management tools (on the site's web server).
META Tag Format Attributes
META tags have two possible attributes, HTTP-EQUIV, or NAME. The first tag "name" in quotes defines the kind of tag, while the "content" in quotes describes the value related to that tag:
<META HTTP-EQUIV="name" CONTENT="content">
<META NAME="name" CONTENT="content">
Basic META Tag Example
The following could be a minimal collection of META tags found on a basic Web page:
<HEAD>
<HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="pets,dogs,puppies,animals,dogs and cats,pet adoption,german shepards,petshop">
<META NAME="description" CONTENT="Bob's Pets, the online pet adoption place, with mixed-breed and pure bred puppies, and dogs of all kinds. Online directory with photos and video. Located in Santa Monica, California.">
<META NAME="author" CONTENT="Bobbo McFiz">
<META NAME="copyright" CONTENT="1999-2000 Bob's Pets Store">
<META NAME="rating" CONTENT="safe for kids">
<META NAME="distribution" CONTENT="local">
<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="INDEX">
<META NAME="language" CONTENT="English">
</HEAD>
META Tag Definitions
If we follow the above example, we can define several things that an average search engine or link spider might look at.
Keywords — used by many search engines with the notable exception of popular portals like Excite, Google, Lycos and Northern Light. These keywords should be comma delimited (separated), and have your preferred "find me by" words and phrases (no more than 256 total characters for best results). Don't repeat single words over and over, but do repeat phrases and topics like "dogs and cats,puppies,adopt a new puppy,dogs,puppy adoptions,pets,kitty kats." There are conflicting opinions about whether a space after each comma is acceptable, but we have found it is best to eliminate them.
Description — used by most search spiders (same exceptions as keywords, above). This is the description that you want seen in search results, and should include two occurances of your favored search terms, if possible. This should also be limited to 256 characters for best results, although some engines may only display the first 64 characters, so those first words are all-important.
Author — not recognized by all resources, but can be useful for in-house tracking of whom did what, and for developers who create Web sites for clients.
Copyright — not recognized by all resources, but is a simple format for adding your copyright statement that is cleaner than varied comment tags littered around the top of your HTML (ideally you should do both). Some folks like to put in the ASCII character for the copyright symbol (ASCII character #169), like so "© 1999 Bob McFiz" but others simply put the date and name. Technically, the U.S. copyright guidelines say the following is acceptable "Copr. © 1999 Bob McFiz" while in practice, it is likely more important to place legal notices within the visible BODY of the document which is a closer equivalent to a published "page."
Rating — with the growing popularity of so-called safe surfing software products for families, adding a rating to your site in some form is a good idea. There are other formats, such as PICS and RSAC, which may be more readily recognized by such commercial software. Those initiatives are beyond the scope of this introductory article.
Distribution — The simplified form used here would typically be global, or local. For instance, a Web directory for Long Beach might be global because of potential tourism, but a walk-in pet adoption site might be local because you can't FedEx pets to other countries (yet). The content refers to the audience distribution, and not your physical location, which might be covered by "geo" META tags.
There are numerous new global and location-oriented META tags in existence, including some which allow you to specify your latitude and longitude(!). Example: Geo.Region, with the content being an ISO3166-2 code.
Robots — there are several ROBOTS-related tags. Robots refers to site spiders, and most top engines will follow these. Possible content variables include ALL, INDEX, NOFOLLOW, NOINDEX. If you were to specify NOINDEX, the spider might still follow links on the page, where NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW would prohibit the spider from following links or indexing the page. This can be useful for things like software manuals, or other content you want only to be viewed from a directory on your site, and not found as individual pages on your site.
A newer tag which might help with image 'bots (like Lycos) is
NOIMAGEINDEX, which prevents the images on the page from being indexed
but the text on the page can still be indexed. A second image-related tag,
NOIMAGECLICK, prevents the use of links directly to the images,
instead there will only be a link to the page. This latter tag is only supported by AltaVista as of this writing (1999). These tags can be particularly useful if you run an online art or image gallery. If this information is critical to you, it is worth spending some time researching the various information pages on each search engine, that describe how they index your site.
Language — for this example, the language for your website such as "English" or "French." Advanced forms can take nested formats, which direct browsers to different pages for each language. Some extended formats include using the tag "content-language" and a standardized international 2-letter language format (ISO639) such as "en-US" for English, U.S. (for U.K., you might use "en-GB").
en - English
ch - Chinese
cs - Czech
da - Danish
de - German
fr - French
he - Hebrew
ja - Japanese
etc.
Other Tags — there are many, many other existing, proposed, and specialized tags which are outside the scope of this article on what search engines look for. For instance, some companies such as Apple and IBM have internal META tags used for indexing. Specialized industries now have some proposed codes for mathematical papers, chemistry, and other sciences. These new tags can assist larger indexes which sort bibliography data.
Breaking Frames — a popular tag, which works with many browsers (requires refresh, which not all browsers support), is:
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Window-target" CONTENT="_top">
Dublin Core — worth learning about, and covered in a separate article (and briefly, below), the proposed standardized Dublin Core set of META tags include: DC.TITLE, DC.CREATOR, DC.SUBJECT, DC.DESCRIPTION, DC.PUBLISHER, DC.CONTRIBUTORS, DC.DATE, DC.TYPE,
DC.FORMAT, DC.IDENTIFIER, DC.SOURCE, DC.LANGUAGE, DC.RELATION, DC.COVERAGE, DC.RIGHTS.
So, for example, you could add some DC tags in addition to basic tags, shown in example above.
<META NAME="DC.SUBJECT" CONTENT="pets and animal adoption">
<META NAME="DC.LANGUAGE" CONTENT="EN-US">
<META NAME="DC.PUBLISHER" CONTENT="Bob's Pet Store">
<META NAME="DC.FORMAT" CONTENT="HTML 3.2">
The Dublin Core Initiative
Because the W3C and HTML spec META tags are largely general in nature, a group has been formed to create a more specific framework for indexing the vast amount of data found and published online. While these may not affect your page development when it comes to search engines like Google, or Northern Light, they may become dominant over the coming years. It might be worthwhile to include DC.value versions of META tags simply to add further potential compliance with future "open source" spiders, with the following caveat.
If your site does not contain articles, published book excerpts, and other archival information, these tags will likely not benefit you. It is likely these tags may only be used by those systems built around XML, or XHTML, at some point in the future.
Each Dublin Core element is defined using a set of ten attributes from the ISO/IEC 11179 [ISO11179] standard for the description of data
elements. These include (v 1.1):
- Name - The label assigned to the data element
- Identifier - The unique identifier assigned to the data element
- Version - The version of the data element
- Registration Authority - The entity authorised to register the data element
- Language - The language in which the data element is specified
- Definition - A statement that clearly represents the concept and essential nature of the data element
- Obligation - Indicates if the data element is required to always or sometimes be present (contain a value)
- Datatype - Indicates the type of data that can be represented in the value of the data element
- Maximum Occurrence - Indicates any limit to the repeatability of the data element
- Comment - A remark concerning the application of the data element
While these may not apply to you or your kind of data, it is important to be aware of these tags as they become more prevelant (particularly when using XML).
Beyond META Tags
Adding META tags to your pages can help both your placement, and ranking in search engines because they force you to be more specific in labeling your Web page content, which you might miss on the actual page. I have seen many sites which offer a product or service, but never actually mention the service on their front page. This is particularly evident on sites which use primarily graphics and image maps, rather than textual links.
Keeping It Simple
Obviously, this brief article has merely scratched the surface of a subject which can be quite more complex than you may have realized.
For our purposes, getting noticed by the search engines, your most important META tags are the "keyword" and "description." You can find a free META-Maker utility at DotComMojo.com that greatly simplifies the process by spitting out tags for you automatically. You can then copy/paste these tags into all your site pages (or add to your template if using a content management system).
One caveat worth noting: don't use another company's registered trademarks in your tags unless you actually sell those products on your site, or have a partnership relationship with them. It's certainly a nice idea to want to be found under your competitor's brand name in your favorite search engine, but this can result in legal entanglements if mis-used.
META tags are only a part of an overall promotion strategy, and there are many, many other elements such as Web page development, marketing plans, and developing relevant content, which affect both acceptance and placement in search engines.
However, the first place to start is probably with those often-lauded, and often misunderstood, META tags.
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Article Copr. © 1999-2003 Christopher Simmons — All Rights Reserved.
Christopher Simmons is president of Torrance, CA-based Neotrope®, a company established in 1983 and specializing in marketing, E-commerce, content development, audio/video conversion, and Web design for small to medium companies. He is a professional author who has written for numerous national magazines including Digital Imaging, Print on Demand Business, Digital Printer, Micro Publishing News, CrossMedia, Polyphony, ComputerPlayer, and Spazz. He is also a member of the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA). A slightly different version of this article originally appeared in Digital Author magazine.
