One of the ways in which search engines index or catalogue Web pages is through meta tags, which are a few lines of simple HTML code. This how-to explains how to use meta tags in Web pages in order to make your Web page more accessible via search engines.
What Are Meta Tags?
Meta tags are used to define meta data. In the most general terms, meta data is information about a document.
Traditionally, the information on the page is content, and meta data is the information used to describe or define that content. Meta data is not content in and of itself, and it doesn’t appear on users’ screens; instead, meta data sits silently in the document’s source code, adding commentary to the page for anyone — or anything — who cares to look.
Meta tags are easy to use on your Web pages. They look just like regular HTML tags, but they follow a few rules:
- all begin with the word META, the element name
- all are located within the HEAD element
- no closing tag is used; the META element is an empty element
When you use a meta tag, you define attribute / value sets. For each attribute, you assign a value. The format might be diagrammed as:
<META AttributeName=”value” AttributeName=”value”>
The <meta> tag is usually found at the top of an HTML document between the </title> and the </head> tags.
Why Use Meta Tags?
Meta tags have a variety of uses, but one of the most common is to convey information about your document that can’t be found anywhere within it. Most sites use meta tags to add keywords to their pages, which helps control how the page is indexed by search engines.
The two <meta> tags you will likely want to use are the content and description tags. Here is an example of both types of <meta> tags.
<HEAD>
<TITLE>My Stamp World</TITLE>
<META name=”description” content=”Everything you wanted to know about stamps, from prices to history.”>
<META name=”keywords” content=”stamps, stamp collecting, stamp history, prices, stamps for sale”>
</HEAD>
Because the description tag allows you to control the description of your content, your listing will look something like this in search engines whose output results support the description tag:
My Stamp World
Everything you wanted to know about stamps, from prices to history.
The meta keywords tag is used by most search engines to index your page; when someone enters particular words in a search engine, your page will hopefully come up if someone types in any of the words listed in your keywords.
For example, someone might enter “stamp collecting”, which will match with one of the keywords in the tag noted above. Without that tag, there would be no chance at all that the page would come up in a search for “stamp collecting”, since “stamp collecting” doesn’t appear anywhere on the page or in the description tag.
How Do I Add Meta Tags?
Below is a step-by-step guide to adding meta tags to your Web pages.
If Working in HTML Code
1. Go into the source code of the document. Once in the code, go to the line between the </title> and </head> tags.
2. Insert the meta description tag:
<meta name=”description” content=”descriptionhere”>
Put your description sentences within the content attribute.
3. Secondly, insert the meta keyword tag:
<meta name=”keywords” content=”keyword1, keyword2″>
Put your keywords within the content attribute.
If Working in Dreamweaver
1. In Dreamweaver’s menu bar, go to “Insert” then “Head Tags ” and choose either Keywords or Description. Enter your information in the boxes provided.
Titles Within Web Pages
Titles are one of the most important yet least understood elements in ensuring that a Web page or site is properly indexed. Most search engines weigh the title of a Web page very heavily; the words in the title can be very important in how “findeable” your site is. Many Web site maintainers forget to include a page title, making the indexing of their page by search engines far less effective.
Be sure to include a useful title in all of your Web pages (this also helps people to more easily find your site in their bookmarks).
A good practice to get into is to standardize the titles of your Web pages. An example:
<title>Using Search Engine Keywords – UBC Public Affairs</title>
Almost every page on the Public Affairs site follows this standard. If this page were to be bookmarked, the first part of the title would be seen in the list of bookmarks; reversing the title — i.e. by putting “UBC Public Affairs” first — may not be as descriptive or helpful to the user.
Keywords and Frames-Based Sites
Using frames for your Web site can be one way of cutting down on the administration of the site, as you can use individual frames to separate the navigation from the content. The individual pages within Web sites that use frames, however, are often not found or indexed very well by search engines. Each individual page within a frames-based site very often does not have individual titles and meta descriptors.
If a page that normally displays within a frames-based site does get indexed by a search engine, it can be disorienting to click on the search engine link and visit the page, as the navigation for the site is often found in another frame. (Essentially, the person who comes to a frames-based site via a link off of a search engine has no way of navigating around the rest of the site.)
For this reason, it is highly recommended that Web sites be based on some other method of separating the content from the navigation (e.g. Dreamweaver templates, FrontPage themes, or server-side includes).
What Words Should I Use? How Many?
Keywords
- think of words “average” people would use to search for your page / site, including combinations — such as “student loans” as well as “student” and “loans” — and even common misspellings
- avoid too many words in your <META> tags; some search engines ignore anything beyond the first 25 words
- don’t repeat words (some search engines will not index pages which use the same word over and over again)
Description
Write a short, concise description of your site (a maximum of 25 words is a good rule of thumb). You may want to go to a search engine and type in one of the keywords for your site; look at the descriptions used by other similar sites in the search results, and try to write a similar description that will interest and inform searchers as to what your site is all about.
Additional Resources
There are many search engine resources available on-line; see Useful Web Development Links for a list of related sites.
