Search Engine Optimization made easy - meta elements
META ELEMENTS
Meta elements are HTML or XHTML elements used to provide structured information about a web page. These elements are placed as tags in the head section of an HTML or XHTML document. They are not directly visible to a user visiting the site. Meta elements can be used to specify page description, keywords and any other information not provided through the other head elements and attributes. An example of a keyword meta element can be seen below:
<meta
name="keywords"
content="wikipedia,encyclopedia">
The use of META ELEMENTS in Search Engine Optimization
Google, in an effort to prevent abuse and false rankings, does not use the HTML keyword or metatag elements for indexing.
Different methods are used to improve a website?s ranking with search engines. In the past, the right meta element usually led to a higher ranking with the search engines ? and thus, higher traffic to the web site. So-called consultants saw the significance of these meta elements and used a variety of techniques (legitimate and otherwise) to improve ranking for their clients.
Meta elements have less significance today as search engine robots have become more sophisticated. More significance is now placed on the volume of incoming links from related websites, quantity and quality of content, technical precision of source code, spelling, functional v. broken hyperlinks, volume and consistency of searches and/or viewer traffic, time within website, page views, revisits, click-throughs, technical user-features, uniqueness, redundancy, relevance, advertising revenue yield, freshness, geography, language and other intrinsic characteristics.
The KEYWORDS attribute
In the mid 1990?s, the keyword element was the most commonly used meta element but by the end of the 90?s, search engine providers realized that information stored in meta elements was often unreliable and misleading. Search engines began dropping support for metadata provided by the meta element in early 2000. Today there is no agreement as to whether or not the keywords attribute has any affect on ranking.
The DESCRIPTION attribute
The description attribute provides a concise explanation of a wepage?s content and is supported by most search engines. The description attribute gives a more meaningful description of the webpage?s listing and is often displayed on search engine results pages. It is recommend that the description contain less than 200 characters of text.
The ROBOTS attribute
Use the robots attribute to control whether or not search engine spiders are allowed to index a page and whether or not they should follow the links from a page. The noindex value prevents a page from being indexed, and nofollow prevents links from being crawled. There are also other values, which dictate how the robot should handle the page. Meta tags are not the best option to prevent search engines from indexing the content of your website. Try using the Robots.txt file , it?s more reliable and efficient.
- NOINDEX tag - tells a search engine not to index a specific page.
- NOFOLLOW tag - tells a search engine not to follow the links on a specific page.
- NOARCHIVE tag - tells a search engine not to store a cached copy of your page.
- NOSNIPPET tag - tells Google not to show a snippet (description) under your search engine listing, it will also not show a cached link in the search results
Additional attibutes for search engines
NOODP
Search engines sometimes use the title and abstract of the Open Directory Project (ODP) listing of a web site for the title and/or description in the search engine results pages. The “NOODP” value for the “robots” element of the meta tags tell the search engine not to use this abstract. The syntax is the same for all search engines that support the tag.
NOYDIR
Yahoo! also uses content from their own Yahoo! directory next to the ODP listing. The NOYDIR meta tag allows webmasters the opportunity not to have this listing displayed.
Robots-nocontent
Yahoo introduced the attribute value: class=”robots-nocontent” which is not a meta tag, but an attribute and value, which can be used throughout web page tags where needed. This attribute tells the Yahoo crawler to ignore the content within the nocontent class.
Redirects
Meta refresh elements instruct a web browser to automatically refresh a web page after a given time interval. One can also specify an alternative URL in order to redirect the user to a different web page. The problem with using meta refresh is that it can be turned off by the user via their browser settings.
