This week, let's discuss the basics of using meta tags in 2008. Things have changed since the days of spamming the search engine spiders with keywords and it's probably time for everyone to catch up.

For those of you familiar with HTML, then you will know that a meta tag is a form of tag that is placed in the HEAD of your HTML document and traditionally has been used to classify the document for any spiders that might parse the code. Most Web content management systems (Web CMS) allow you some control over meta tags, mainly the meta keywords and meta description.

These days, meta tags aren't the be-all and end-all for determining your ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPs), in fact, it could be argued that all meta tags are now further down the list of importance when it comes to search engine rankings.

The Meta Keywords Tag

There was a time when having the right keywords in your meta keyword tag was the most important aspect to building content for a page. Thankfully this is no longer the case and keywords are now more important in context to the content of the page. These days most search engines all but ignore the meta keyword tag. That said, there are some minor engines out there that do still use keywords, therefore it is still worthwhile to use meta keywords even just as another method of providing additional information related to a page or site topic (which is the purpose of metadata in the first place – more on that when we talk about Dublin Core below).

The format for meta keywords is generally to include up to 25 words or phrases, relevant to the content on the page, and separated by commas.

The Meta Description Tag

The meta description tag is much more important and much more interesting when it comes to the search engines. First and foremost, the meta description is what will usually be displayed as the page description in the SERPs (I say usually since there are several instances when this may not be the case – more on that with ODP and NoYdir below). If you do not have a meta description indicated on the page, the SERPs will generally show a snippet of code from the listed page that also contains the keyword phrase.  There are also instances when the SERPs will list the meta description from your homepage (if it contains the keyword phrase searched).

The other advantage of using a targeted content description is that the SERPs will generally highlight (bold) the keyword phrase searched if it is included in the description. Users who see the term they searched for highlighted in the description or title are much more likely to think that the result is relevant to their search, and hopefully be motivated to click. The bottom line is to ensure you include meta description tags on every page possible on your site.

The format for meta description is usually 200 to 250 characters in length.  Anything more will probably not get indexed and, depending on the search engine, only a small portion of this amount may be displayed. The description can be in sentence format or it can also be a list of facts regarding the page such as Author, Categorization etc. For example:

<META NAME="Description" CONTENT="Author: A.N. Author, Illustrator: P. Picture, Category: Books, Price: $17.99, Length: 784 pages">

Refer to the Google Webmaster Help Center for more information about how to create good meta descriptions.

The Open Directory Project (ODP) and Yahoo! Directory (YDIR) Tags

The Open Directory Project (dmoz) and Yahoo! Directory are comprehensive site directories that both have influence on the search engine results and, sometimes, what content is displayed on the SERPs. As mentioned above, Google and some of the other search engines have a tendancy to use the ODP description (and sometimes title) if the page referenced doesn't have an appropriate meta description.  This has also been observed when there is other relevant content on the page (i.e. keywords in the ODP description vs the page description). Yahoo has also been known to present similar results using their Yahoo! Directory Service.

The easiest way to ensure that your descriptions are always being shown rather than ODP's or YDIR's is to include a robots tag indicating not to use either of these. The NOODP tag is generally accepted by all search engines that use ODP for results.

Examples:

• Open Directory Project:

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOYDIR"> http://dir.yahoo.com/

• Yahoo! Directory:

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP"> http://www.dmoz.org/

The “Other” Meta Tags

There are a number of other meta tags that can be used when creating content and classification for your pages, some minor (Favicon) and some not so minor (Author).

There are a series of meta tags that have been developed to provide standardization for taxonomy and metadata classification of digital content (from Text to Images and Video) . This metadata standard, named the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) was developed by the Online Computer Library Center in 1995 as a means of classifying all of their digital resources. Essentially, the Dublin Core provides a set of standardized meta tags that can be used to organize your data. Although there isn't wide adoption of the Dublin Core Standards thus far, there will likely be a higher dependence on them as organizations (especially government and institutional) require stricter classification and organization of digital content and also with the proliferatoin of Universal Search.

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About The Author

Jeff Jones is a Web-optimization specialist at Lyris. He helps companies improve their Web sites, SEO results and PPC-campaign performance.

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