DES 3006 - Web Design II
Week Eleven | Part One: Meta Tags
Meta DATA vs. Meta TAGS
Meta data is, basically, data about data. When you use a library database to look up information about a subject, the search function you perform examines the library database for matches to your query.
The most well-known example of meta data is The Dublin Core, "an open organization engaged in the development of interoperable online metadata standards that support a broad range of purposes and business models." Most librarians and researchers are familiar with the work of this group.
Meta tags provide information about a Web page to a search agent (like Google) about the basic contents of your page.
Search engines once placed emphasis on the information contained in the Meta tag. Consequently, Web developers concentrated on the clever use of meta tags in their page markup code as a part of their SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, strategy.
The days of using meta tags as the magic solution to gaining high ranking on search engines are long gone, but they are still a worthwhile portion of your coding and provide a few very useful functions.
You should still utilize meta tags to provide information about your Web page in a SERP (Search Engine Results Page).
The example from my Web site Saints in Glass will help illustrate this:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html lang="en">
<head>
<title>Saints in Glass</title>
<META HTTP-EQUIV="CONTENT-LANGUAGE" CONTENT="English">
<META HTTP-EQUIV="CHARSET" CONTENT="UTF-8">
<META NAME="TITLE" CONTENT="Saints in Glass">
<META NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="Saints in Glass celebrates the beauty of
fourteen exquisitely crafted stained glass windows and the saints who
inspired them.">
<META NAME="KEYWORDS" CONTENT="catholic, saints, stained, glass, windows,
religious, art, history, sacred heart, church, dover, new jersey">
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="index,nofollow">
<META NAME="OWNER" CONTENT="sitemaster@bigplum.com">
<META NAME="AUTHOR" CONTENT="doug hooper">
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Pragma" CONTENT="no-cache">
<META HTTP-EQUIV="EXPIRES" CONTENT="31 Dec 2000 00:00:01 PST">
<META NAME="RATING" CONTENT="General">
Let's look at each element one by one.
Meta Tag Elements
Meta tags are information inserted into the "head" area of your Web page.
Other than the title tag, information in the head area of your web pages is not seen by those viewing your pages in browsers.
Instead, meta information in this area is used to communicate information that a visitor may not be concerned with, but which a search 'bot (search robot, aka meta crawler) might be.
For example, meta tags, can tell a browser what language to use or which "character set" (Remember DES 3006 - Week Nine- Part I?) to use or whether a web page has self-rated itself in terms of adult content. For example:
<META HTTP-EQUIV="CONTENT-LANGUAGE" CONTENT="English"> <META HTTP-EQUIV="CHARSET" CONTENT="UTF-8">
1. The Title Tag
The HTML title tag isn't really a meta tag, but whatever text you place in the title tag will appear in the reverse bar of someone's browser window. You can also use a meta tag to reinforce the information, but it is not strictly necessary. The title tag is also used as the description of your page when someone adds it to their "Favorites" or "Bookmarks" lists.
<META NAME="TITLE" CONTENT="Saints in Glass">
The title tag is important to search engines, and all major crawlers will use the text of your title tag as the text they use for the title of your page in the SERP.
2. The Description Tag
The meta description tag allows you to influence the description of your page in the crawlers that support the tag.
Let's look at my example again:
<META NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="Saints in Glass celebrates the beauty of
fourteen exquisitely crafted stained glass windows and the saints who inspired them.">
The text you want shown as your description goes between the quotation marks after the "content=" portion of the tag. You can use between 200 to 250 characters, though only a smaller portion of this amount may be displayed.
I recommend you use the meta description tag for your pages because it gives you control with how crawlers display your page information. A smart way to do this can be to take the first sentence of your body copy from your Web page and use it for the meta description. That's what I did for Saints in Glass.
3. The Keywords Tag
The keywords tag allows you to provide additional text for crawler-based search engines to index along with your body copy. Again, an example:
<META NAME="KEYWORDS" CONTENT="catholic, saints, stained, glass, windows,
religious, art, history, sacred heart, church, dover, new jersey">
The problem is that most crawlers now ignore the keywords tag.
The keywords tag is sometimes useful as a way to reinforce the terms you think are important. For instance, if you had a page about coin collecting and you add the words "coin collecting" in your body copy, then including the words "coin collecting" in the keywords tag may help boost your page a bit higher on the SERP.
Remember, if you don't use the words "coin collecting" on the page at all, then adding them just to the keywords tag will not help your rankings. The text in the meta keywords tag works together with the text in your body copy.
Go to Week Eleven - Part II