Meta Elements
A Study in Search Engine Optimization
Travis Drainville 2/5/2015
Advanced Web Programming CIT 251
Dr. Kate Pulling
Websters dictionary defines the word meta- as an underlying definition or description, which would make metadata data that defines or describes the work that it is a part of. Mostly this data is used for describing the data to search engines in short descriptive blurbs when the page is indexed; however it can also possibly affect the rank of a website on many search engines, though this is a hotly debated issue. For reasons of simplicity we will just state that properly formatting and using proper conventions that will be discussed below will provide a net benefit that outweighs the time spent implementing meta-tags in your work.
There are a few meta-tags that you can use on your website, and they are not mandatory in order for your code to work and validate properly. You do not need to include any meta-tags in your website if you are not comfortable with the idea, however this will have an overall neutral effect (again this is hotly debated) and you will not gain the benefit of using metadata if you do not implement them. Due to search engines closely guarding their algorithms and for the sake of keeping any one company from being able to monopolize the first page (without paying for it in some cases) meta-tags have fallen from their status of absolute usage. To better
understand how meta-tags have evolved over the course of their usage we will first have to look into the history of search engines and the history of search engine optimization (SEO).
In the beginning (about 20 years ago) there was not much in the way of searching for data on the web, there was no google, nor were there fancy algorithms that determine relevance, there were no web crawlers. In this time period search engines were indexed by hand and incredibly inefficient. Enter Brian Pinkerton, who in 1994 launches WebCrawler the worlds first search engine that utilized a text input search that more importantly to us also used a web robot to index content. Early web crawlers were basic and essentially amounted to counting the number of times a word would appear in a website, leading to many incorrect and outdated views on how
your site should be set up so as to get the best results for your SEO even with our modern search engines.
Enter the humble meta-tag, the first of which would be the keywords attribute, which became popular around 1995 and quickly took off into one of the most commonly used meta-tag. This is where one of the biggest controversies around metadata exists, in the early days keyword over-stuffing was rampant, someone with a website that sells washing machines might have come up with keyword examples such as:
<meta name=”keywords” content=”washing machines, washing machines, washing machines, washnig machines, washing macines, {300 or so more variations and misspellings of the same two words}, LG, Samsung, GE, Kenmore“ />
The problem with this method is that there is nothing of value here, there are other more correct ways to write a keywords tag that offer more relevance to the search operation. Keep in mind that your keywords are visible in the source as well and the crawler can see it, if you were to over use certain words the crawler might mark you as spam. A proper keywords tag would lay out the entire page in a few words such as:
<meta name=”keywords” content=”washing machines, washing machine, washnig machines, LG washing machine, Kenmore washing machine, Samsung washing machine” />
There are less keywords in this example, but the data is more concise and is actually indicative of what is being sold. The difference between “LG” and “LG washing machine” might seem like it would hinder your results because more people would be looking for “LG” than the exact phrase “LG washing machine” but the fact is that “LG” is just too broad for it to be relevant to the site in question. It is also advisable to include a few of the more common misspellings of your
keywords because it will help to get people who are typing fast and make a mistake, or just plain don’t know how to spell the word.
The next meta-tag is the description tag, no matter the take on metadata this is usually believed to be one of the most important, this description is what the search engine sometimes uses to create a blurb under your website header that describes your site to the person using the search engine. There are many rules that SEO experts try and stick to with the descriptions; however one of the most important is to keep your tags within the 150-160 character range. Google will generally only display around 150 characters and as it is the most commonly used search engine, we will be using it for our example. Sticking with the washing machine sales website, the proper description might look like:
<meta name=”description” content=” Master Wash offers a large variety of washing machines and driers of all makes and models from our warehouse of thousands. Located in Las Vegas, NV 89108” />
This example falls between 150-160 characters and is descriptive enough to catch the attention of anyone who may wonder what your website does. The other thing to keep in mind is that the description needs to be different for any additional pages on the website.
The next noteworthy meta-tag which doesn’t seem to get as much attention as the other tags despite its usefulness is the robots tag. The robots tag can control the way search engine crawlers see your pages, and can help the indexing process. While not as important as the description and keywords tags it performs the important task of letting a search engine know what pages of your site you want indexed and what pages you do not want indexed. This gives a measure of control to your site if say you have an admin control login page that you want to not
show up on a search but you still need to be able to access through a direct link. Many CMS systems have admin login pages that need to be protected, keep in mind the first level of security is through obscurity. Using a robots tag would allow you to keep that page from being crawled while keeping the rest of your site indexed.
There are many more tags that can be used to declare other forms of identification, such as the author tag, or the copyright tag, or even tags that give relevant information to the user such as the revised tag. These tags are not usually used by SEO and can be used as identifiers for other purposes, such as attribution and in the case of tags like the revised tags determining the age of the data displayed and therefore its relevance today. Keeping in mind that no meta-tag is required for a page to work, it is not advisable to put every meta tag on every page, just that the most relevant tags should be put on each page. Keywords, description, author, and copyright are a bare minimum of what should be placed on each page for SEO purposed but they are by no means the only tags that can be used.
