Meta Element Used In Search Engine Optimization

Meta elements provide information about a given Web page, most often to help search engines categorize them correctly. They are inserted into the HTML document, but are often not directly visible to a user visiting the site.

They have been the focus of a field of marketing research known as search engine optimization (SEO), where different methods are explored to provide a user's site with a higher ranking on search engines. In the mid to late 1990s, search engines were reliant on meta data to correctly classify a Web page and webmasters quickly learned the commercial significance of having the right meta element, as it frequently led to a high ranking in the search engines — and thus, high traffic to the website.

As search engine traffic achieved greater significance in online marketing plans, consultants were brought in who were well versed in how search engines perceive a website. These consultants used a variety of techniques (legitimate and otherwise) to improve ranking for their clients.

Meta elements have significantly less effect on search engine results pages today than they did in the 1990s and their utility has decreased dramatically as search engine robots have become more sophisticated. This is due in part to the nearly infinite re-occurrence (keyword stuffing) of meta elements and/or to attempts by unscrupulous website placement consultants to manipulate (spamdexing) or otherwise circumvent search engine ranking algorithms.

While search engine optimization can improve search engine ranking, consumers of such services should be careful to employ only reputable providers. Given the extraordinary competition and technological craftsmanship required for top search engine placement, the implication of the term "search engine optimization" has deteriorated over the last decade. Where it once implied bringing a website to the top of a search engine's results page, for some consumers it now implies a relationship with keyword spamming or optimizing a site's internal search engine for improved performance.

Major search engine robots are more likely to quantify such extant factors as 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 Keyword Attribute

The keywords attribute was popularized by search engines such as Infoseek and AltaVista in 1995, and its popularity quickly grew until it became one of the most commonly used meta elements. By late 1997, however, search engine providers realized that information stored in meta elements, especially the keywords attribute, was often unreliable and misleading, and at worst, used to draw users into spam sites. (Unscrupulous webmasters could easily place false keywords into their meta elements in order to draw people to their site.)

Search engines began dropping support for metadata provided by the meta element in 1998, and by the early 2000s, most search engines had veered completely away from reliance on meta elements. In July 2002, AltaVista, one of the last major search engines to still offer support, finally stopped considering them.

No consensus exists whether or not the keywords attribute has any effect on ranking at any of the major search engines today. It is speculated that it does, if the keywords used in the meta can also be found in the page copy itself. With respect to Google, thirty-seven leaders in search engine optimization concluded in April 2007 that the relevance of having your keywords in the meta-attribute keywords is little to none and in September 2009 Matt Cutts of Google announced that they are no longer taking keywords into account whatsoever. However, both these articles suggest that Yahoo! still makes use of the keywords meta tag in some of its rankings. Yahoo! itself claims support for the keywords meta tag in conjunction with other factors for improving search rankings. In Oct 2009 Search Engine Round Table announced that "Yahoo Drops The Meta Keywords Tag Also" but informed us that the announcement made by Yahoo!'s Senior Director of Search was incorrect. In the corrected statement Yahoo! Senior Director of Search states that "...What changed with Yahoo's ranking algorithms is that while we still index the meta keyword tag, the ranking importance given to meta keyword tags receives the lowest ranking signal in our system.... it will actually have less effect than introducing those same words in the body of the document, or any other section."

The Description Attribute

Unlike the keywords attribute, the description attribute is supported by most major search engines, like Yahoo! and Bing, while Google will fall back on this tag when information about the page itself is requested (e.g. using the related: query) keywords are very important in description to increase the ranking of site in search engine. The description attribute provides a concise explanation of a Web page's content. This allows the Web page authors to give a more meaningful description for listings than might be displayed if the search engine was unable to automatically create its own description based on the page content. The description is often, but not always, displayed on search engine results pages, so it can affect click-through rates. Industry commentators have suggested that major search engines also consider keywords located in the description attribute when ranking pages. W3C doesn't specify the size of this description meta tag, but almost all search engines recommend it to be shorter than 155 characters of plain text.

The Language Attribute

The language attribute tells search engines what natural language the website is written in (e.g. English, Spanish or French), as opposed to the coding language (e.g. HTML). It is normally an IETF language tag for the language name. It is of most use when a website is written in multiple languages and can be included on each page to tell search engines in which language a particular page is written

The Robots Atribute

The robots attribute, supported by several major search engines, controls whether search engine spiders are allowed to index a page, or not, and whether they should follow links from a page, or not. The attribute can contain one or more comma-separate values. The noindex value prevents a page from being indexed, and nofollow prevents links from being crawled. Other values recognized by one or more search engines can influence how the engine indexes pages, and how those pages appear on the search results. These include noarchive, which instructs a search engine not to store an archived copy of the page, and nosnippet, which asks that the search engine not include a snippet from the page along with the page's listing in search results.

Meta tags are not the best option to prevent search engines from indexing content of a website. A more reliable and efficient method is the use of the robots.txt file (robots exclusion standard).