Search engine meta tags

This is old news but perhaps it’s worth mentioning again.

Quite some time ago, Danny Sullivan from Search engine watch had written an excellent article, which ought to re-read by every so-called “webmaster” and anyone else claiming to understand search engine optimisation.

Apart from Google, who have never used them, virtually all the other crawler-based search engines have long ago discovered that meta tags can no longer be relied upon as an accurate and truthful means of ranking web content. Although there are a number of meta tags in use, only one of them really matters. In summary:

• Description: This tag enjoys much support, and it is well worth using.
• Keywords: This tag is only supported by some major crawlers and probably isn’t worth the time to implement.
• Robots: This tag enjoys full support, but you only need it if you do not want your pages indexed.
• Everything else: Any other meta tag you see is ignored by the major crawlers, though they may be used by specialized search engines.

Chris Beasley from Website Publisher backs this up with his article for SitePoint, a few months later:

“To prove to yourself that Google doesn’t use meta tags, put words into your meta tags that do not appear elsewhere on your page. Then, using an advanced search, search for those words while limiting the results to your domain only. You can try this on any search engine — and if results appear, you’ll know that engine uses meta tags. If no results are displayed, then you know meta tags are not used. It is important, though, that the words only appear in your meta tags and no where else on your page.”

Relevancy in content, especially the page headers and link anchor text is what matters. Also, although not a meta tag, the page title tag is the other important information to almost all search engines. Making the title of the page relevant to the content is doubly important because browsers will typically use it as the description when that page is bookmarked, or “favorited” in Microsoft-speak, I suppose.

Posted in Business, Marketing, Rants, SEO, Usability, Web by Ivan