What is a Meta Tag?
Monday, August 13, 2007 - By: Brian D
You may have heard the term, “Meta Tag,” in reference to your website or the Internet and not know what that meant other than someone is a big nerd and you are not. You may know that Meta tags have something to do with search engines, but were afraid to ask. For many Meta tags are that great mystery reserved to be solved by the most geeky search engine optimization types who, cloistered away, decide the fate of yours and the millions of other websites indexed by search engines.
Fortunately, Meta Tags do not have to dwell in HTML esoterica. You too can understand and utilize Meta Tags in your AgentAdvantage site. We’ll begin unraveling the mystery of Meta tags by examining their origin.
Meta tags, or Meta Elements, are HTML tags used to by search engines to catalog your webpage. These tags contain descriptive information about your website. Being data about data, Meta tags are a type and get their name from Metadata. One of the most notable examples of Metadata is a library card catalog. While you may not find the entire book within the card entry, you will find pertinent data like author, subject, date published, and where you can find the item (according to its Dewey Decimal or Library of Congress number). The Internet bears much similarity to a library. Like reference librarians, search engines find what you need based on Metadata, and in the case of your web page, Meta tags.
Structure of a Meta Tag
Meta tags are located in the <head> tag of your website. For an explanation of HTML tags, see this article.
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>YOUR HOMETOWN FLORIDA - YOUR HOMETOWN Homes and Real Estate For Sale - Realtor®</TITLE>
<META NAME="description" CONTENT="Welcome to learningcenter.directhomes.com, the most comprehensive web site available for real estate in the Your Hometown, Florida area. If you are looking to buy or sell a home, you have come to the right place. Homes For Sale, Real Estate, Realtor, Agent, Real Estate Agent, Real Estate Broker, Relocation">
<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="Home, Homes, Houses, Real Estate, Realtor, Realtors, Agent, Agents, Broker, Brokers, Relocation, Moving, Your Hometown, Florida">
<link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="/images/elements/design26-contemporary-03/css/design26contemporary03.css"/>
<link href="/css/aaba.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
< META HTTP-EQUIV="Expires" CONTENT="Mon, 06 Jan 1990 00:00:01 GMT">
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Pragma" CONTENT="no-cache">
<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript" SRC="/javascript/navigation.js"></SCRIPT>
</HEAD>
Like many HTML tags, < META> possesses a variety of attributes used to delinate its respective parts. To briefly describe these attributes:
Keywords
Keywords are words used to categorize your site formatted like this:
<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="Home, Homes, Houses, Real Estate, Realtor, Realtors, Agent, Agents, Broker, Brokers, Relocation, Moving, Your Hometown, Florida">
As you can see, “keywords” is a list of search terms that one might enter into a search engine. In the heyday of “crawler” type search engines, keywords provided the primary source of index data for web pages. The “crawler” (picture a big robotic spider) did just that, “crawled” through the pages of the web, specifically looking for this attribute of the META tag. As you might imagine, indexing a page primarily based on hidden data could lead to some abuse. Unscrupulous webmasters would add keywords far from germane to the content of their sites. Back in the earlier days of the Net, Granny Prodigy-User looking for home and garden information might find something entirely objectionable when performing a search for a needed garden tool. Needless to say, as the Internet became more commercial and mainstream, and families with children became avid Internet users, search engines became pressured to deliver more valid, accurate and safe results. Eventually, search engines came to ignore the keyword tag in indexing sites.
Why then do we include keywords if they are obsolete? Keywords allow the search engine to determine whether or not your site is spam, or highly irrelevant. Search engines send sites containing the identical or highly-similar sets of keywords to the bottom of the search results. Often identical keywords mean that an identical site appears somewhere out there. It does not benefit the web-surfing public for the first ten search results all be the same site! Additionally, it’s safe to assume that those with 100 identical websites engage in one form of spam or another! You need distinct keywords to make sure that your website does NOT appear as spam to search engines!
Description
Traditionally, the Description attribute of a META tag became the blurb appearing below the URL of a website in a search engine’s results. Many search engines still use Description to aid in site indexing and blurb generation. Google, however, does not use this description to generate a description of your index site.
