Is There Power In Tags? Exploring The Usefulness Of Meta Tags
If you surf the web frequently, you may notice that certain sites come up more often
than not when you use certain search strings and even if these sites do not seem to have the keywords that you are looking for. If you are even more web-savvy, you may also notice that the source file, or text source, of the website that you are viewing has certain terms placed at the start of the file. Strangely, you also notice that these terms do not appear on the web page itself, but the terms also seem to be many and diverse in nature.
These terms are often referred to as Meta elements, and they are grouped at the top of a web page as a Meta tag. Meta tags have long been used to give information on a specific page by providing keywords associated with it. Search engine robots pick up these meta tags and keywords and use them to categorize the web page into certain classifications, and to index the page so that future searches using terms in the meta tag will yield the web page.
Because such Meta elements are invisible to web page viewers, some web masters or web page designers use them to store tens, even hundreds of keywords, to help search engines index the site. This invisibility has also led to abuse: not all the tens or hundreds of keywords will be completely associated with the site, but will simply be popular search strings during that time. This can index the site incorrectly and direct hapless web users to a site that will not serve them any purpose at all.
The increased hits to a website, however, can mean more power to the web owner and webmaster. This article explores the usefulness of Meta elements, and how they are already being replaced by more precise search engine indexing methods.
SEO: A Beginning
Meta tags figure frequently in the field of search engine optimization, a marketing scheme whereby various methods are proposed, tested, and utilized to allow websites to rank higher in search engines. A higher rank can mean more web visitors; this is especially important to small business and art-related websites that rely on web popularity to gain sponsorship and funding.
In the early years of the Internet, search engines relied on Meta tags to pick up keywords and classify web pages into specific categories. As search engines became more and more popular, web masters and developers realized that Meta tags could work to a web makers advantage. Use slowly turned to abuse, as webmasters stored hundreds of keywords within a Meta tag, placing decent websites under the more popular (albeit indecent) pornographic or easy money categories. Conversely, indecent sites, such as spam sites, were leading more and more traffic to their end by tweaking their Meta tags.
Search engine engineers realized the trend that Meta tags were taking, and they thus re-engineered their robots and indexing tools to better index sites. Meta tags eventually lost popularity, as the twenty-first century opened, and as major search engines dropped their Meta tag support.
The New and Better SEO
Todays popular search engines, such as Yahoo! and Google, do not support Meta tags that contain keywords. Instead, these search engines use robots that scour sites for keywords. If certain words are repeated at a certain frequency, the web site or web page will be indexed under that keyword. The only tag which these seearch engines do use is the HTML title tag, which aids indexing by placing sites together by title.
Some sites employing Meta tags and Meta data, moreover, are already being penalized. For instance, if a certain site repeats a certain keyword too many times, its search engine ranking can actually go down. Although this can be unlikely over a short period of time, a search engine can actually ignore a web site that repeats keywords too many times, or repeats keywords that do not correspond to the rest of its text content.
So are Meta tags still useful? If you are a web master seeking to improve the ranking of your site, then you may be better off following modern SEO principles. Instead of relying on Meta tags, optimize your content. Make sure that your web pages are replete with the right keywords, and that these keywords are available at the right density. Make sure, moreover, that your content is actually useful. In the digital world, content is king, and no amount of Meta data can change that.
If you still want to use Meta tags, however, be sure to place only the keywords that actually correspond to your sites content. What you want to have is a useful, quickly indexed website that will help your intended market with its wants and needs. You cannot afford to tweak your site but still have it ignored by the search engines that will help you reach out to your target market.
by: Elijah Chai
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