META Tags

A History and Overview of Current Use

by Sean Cairns

META tags (more correctly META elements) are a component of HTML and XHTML documents that provide an end user with information beyond that which is displayed in the content of the file, also known as meta data. The name "meta" comes from the Greek word for "self", that is to say that it is self-referencing. Thus it is data that is inside of a file that simply describes the file.

In the earliest days of the internet, META information was used by search engines to determine the content of a website so as to provide searchers with a better idea as to the contents of the page before they clicked on the hyperlink. Search engine optimization was directly proportional to the quality of one's META information; who would know what information was contained in a website better than the person coding it?

Unfortunately, unscrupulous coders realized this as well, and in order to maximize their site's rankings, and to even trick users searching for something unrelated to click on their link, webmasters began stuffing their keyword META tags with as many high-search words as possible. In the late 1990's, it wasn't uncommon to find even a reputable site with a few questionable keywords just to boost visitor numbers.

Search engine coders quickly got wise to what was going on and rapidly began depreciating the importance of META information, to the point that by 2007, no major search engine's search rankings are positively affected by a page's META tags. Some search engines, however, do lower a site's ranking if none of the keywords match the content found in the site itself!

Current Use of META

With search engines mostly ignoring META tags for search optimization, it almost seems like a waste to even take the time to code them, right? Not true at all. Every search engine worth using still uses META tags, albeit in a different way than they were initially intended!

Description Attribute
The "description" META tag is the probably the single easiest way to increase traffic to your website. Go perform a search on Google for something, anything. The 200 characters of plain text that you read after a page's name comes from the site's "description". This is the fastest, easiest way to convey to a possible visitor exactly what is on your site quickly and concisely. This is your first and best chance to grab their attention and get them to enter your site.

Language Attribute
The "language" tag tells a search engine what language your site is in... and what other languages it can be found in on the page. This is a wonderful tool for sites that display their content in multiple languages, and helps boost the site's rankings for search engines in that language.

Keywords Attribute
While keywords have fallen by the wayside in recent years, it's still important to keep a page's keyword list up-to-date and correct for a variety of reasons. As stated above, some search engines will lower your ranking for improper or missing keywords. More so than that, however, is their importance for in-site searching. If your site is going to have a search box that only searches the pages within your own site for information, keywords suddenly skyrocket in importance – even search boxes like the free one provided by Google uses keywords to books rankings in your own site.

Why? The answer is simply that if you're searching within your own site, the search engine can assume that you're not trying to boost your visitors with phony keywords, since they're already in your site! So keywords become an essential part of categorizing and sorting the various pages of content you have.

The Future of META

Every so often, new META tags are unveiled as the internet evolves and changes. New tags like the "robots" attribute tell web-spiders which pages are to be indexed, and when that index will become obsolete. The "zip code" and "state" META tags help with some business search directories. Several powerhouse search engines even have their own special, unique META tags so webmasters can tell them to ignore information generated by the Open Directory Project (this is the information created when a "description" tag is not present. It's never a pretty result.). In the future, there will probably be tags for sites that are optimized for HD screens, flash-heavy sites, and even special tags for social media sites, that update themselves based on the content you upload!