A Meta Tag Adventure

By Emory Rowland
Posted Friday, September 17, 2004

If You Build It, They Will Not Come

Suppose your name is Woody and you want to promote your chainsaw dealership via the Internet. You build a web site that announces the products and services of Chainsaw Sales to the world. You design the site with the latest software tools and host it with the most powerful servers available. You work very hard and put a lot of time into this project. During the process, you learn a lot about how web sites work. Your employees notice that the job title on your business card now reads "Chief Web Developer" instead of "President." You fancy yourself a technology artist. So proud are you of the new site that you offer the first ten visitors a free chainsaw valued at $1000. Such a site would receive thousands of hits from the timber cutting community, right?

You check the statistics a week after publishing the site and learn, to your disappointment, that it received a mere one hit! Only your mother-in-law who cut and pasted the link into her AOL browser managed to traverse your work of art. She now demands that you not only deliver her free chainsaw, but that you use it to clear a nasty grove of redwoods from her back yard. Family politics aside, you shouldn't take it personally that no one came to the Internet grand opening of Chainsaw Sales, should you? Nah. Successful web artists only pity the competition. Besides, those missing visitors were probably just not aware that the greatest chainsaw dealership in the world made its web debut. But, how are people going to find your web site without you actually giving them the address? Doesn't the Internet do that automatically?

You brew some coffee and perform a Yahoo search using the words "web" and "promote" and "increase traffic." After a bit of reading you learn that you can promote your site to various search engines and that you can optimize the ranking by using something called "meta tags." You read further. As best you can determine, meta tags announce the topic of your pages, describe their content, and provide other information useful for search engines in cataloguing pages. So, if your pages contain meta tags that accurately describe the site, you might get visitors who will buy some chainsaws. Visitors who search Looksmart.com for Chainsaw Sales should return results that yield a link to the page and an accurate description of what they will find there.

I'm an Artist, not a Programmer

As you research meta tags a bit further, you learn that they are actually part of the html code inside an html page. Thats a negative because the newly discovered right side of your brain shuns mathematics. Besides, you have been warned by your programmer friends of the mysterious missing time phenomenon that prevents coders from accounting for hours, even days of time. But youve come too far to let html stand in the way of your technology renaissance. Knowing html will help you create meta tags, but it's not necessary.

After reviewing meta tags on other web sites, you surmise that they tend to occur in two forms: the META NAME and the HTTP-EQUIV varieties. The first tag below tells search engine spiders to come back after two weeks. The second tag tells spiders when the pages content expires so it knows when to revisit. Spiders are agents that gather content for search engine databases. Besides the words META NAME and HTTP-EQUIV, both tags are exactly alike in syntax. The only other difference is whats inside the quotation marks. The first item in quotes describes what the tag does, the second item in quotes is the variable or the part that you change to affect search engine placement.

All meta tags should be placed between the <HEAD> and </HEAD> tags in your html source. The opening <HEAD> tag usually comes at the beginning of the source code after the opening <HTML> tag (normally the very first tag that appears).

The Big Three

The more you research meta tags, the more tag types you discover, each with its own good intentions. After sifting through over a hundred or so, choosing the right tags for your web site becomes a confusing task. Even the tag names themselves can be daunting to the non-programmer. There are actually tags called Abstractand Pragma.However, three particular tags seem more common than the others: Title, Keywords, and Description.

The Title tag states the name of your page and perhaps a brief description. The title of your page should be enclosed between the opening and closing tags, <TITLE> and </TITLE> respectively. You can simply insert the name of your home page or company as in:

<TITLE>Chainsaw Sales</TITLE>

Or include the title with a short description as in:

<TITLE>Chainsaw Sales - a cut above saw dealer</TITLE>

The title text is not viewable by your visitors in the page itself, but shows up in the Windows task bar and in a browsers favorites or bookmarks. If you include a description in your title, it should not be longer than about five words or else the browsers favorites will truncate the title when bookmarked. Notice that the Title tag is a standard html tag and does not include META NAME and HTTP-EQUIV nor quotation marks.

The Keywords tag makes words that describe the content of your page available to search engines. Commas should separate the keywords. The most important words should appear first. You want to think very carefully about which words to use. Flaunting your vocabulary or using redundancy is usually not the best practice. Although search engines now place less emphasis on this tag than in previous years, Inktomi still uses the it. With some careful thought, you place these keywords in your Keywords meta tag:

With the Description tag, you want to take a minimalist approach, squeezing as much important information about your page as possible in the smallest amount of space. The page description should be less than 200 words. A reflection on the mission statement and business model of Chainsaw Sales yields the following Description meta tag:

You are confident that most site rankings can be greatly improved by simply using the big three meta tags. You insert these tags into the source of your main page and publish it to the web. The tags appear together like this:

<TITLE>Chainsaw Sales - a cut above saw dealer</TITLE>

The Long Arm of Spammers

A few months go by after your meta tag coup. The ten chainsaws from the free giveaway have been shipped. Your traffic has increased greatly. Your mother-in-laws redwoods have been cleared. You have received numerous orders via the Internet. However, you notice that you are suddenly getting a hefty amount of spam in your inbox. Not that you dont already shovel your share of spam, but something seems different. This spam is not from the usual spammers, but from some unfamiliar sources, including some invitations of a particularly deviant sort.

After some investigating, you discover the culprit was the E-mail meta tag that you inserted into your web pages. You thought that the tag would be used by someone who needed to contact you for a business reason. However, it turns out that spammers (proliferators of unsolicited e-mail) have actually sent out their own spiders and gathered your e-mail address for unscrupulous marketing purposes! The solution is to remove your good e-mail address and replace it with an address that you filter or check once a month, your spam target address. Beware of the E-mail tag! An example is:

Conclusion

There is much more to meta tag lore than discussed here. In the above adventure, Woody looks at the trees, not the forest. Each search engine employs different methods of gathering data for indexing. Meta tags are not a guarantee of high placement, but may help rankings with some search engines, especially when using the big three.

Many programs and free online meta tag generator tools make it easy to create meta tags without even looking at the html source. One such program is <(http://www.clickfire.com/tools/freeware/metty>Metty Freeware) Meta Tag Maker. After publishing your web pages, keep your eye on the way search engines are displaying and ranking them. Experiment with meta tags. You may learn something and you may discover yourself to be an artist.

About the Author
Emory Rowland is webmaster of Clickfire.com (http://www.clickfire.com), a free resource web site featuring viewpoints, tools, and content for webmasters. A generous selection of articles, freeware, and graphics are available at Clickfire.com to serve the needs of newbies and geeks alike.