Meta Tags and
Search Engines
There are a couple of common
misconceptions about meta tags, and both revolve around using meta tags to
help the search engine "spiders" index a site.
First, is that your pages do
not have to have meta tags in order for the Search Engine spiders to find
and index it.
Spiders find your page whether or not it has meta tags. The tags do, however,
help some spiders index it in the way you want it indexed.
Second, is that you can not control the exact way your site is indexed
by using some magic formula of meta tags. For some spiders, the meta tags
provide guidelines, but the content of meta tags is weighed with other
factors, and each spider uses meta tag information differently.
It's a good idea to include meta
tags in your pages, but don't expect miracles. Use meta tags intelligently, to
increase your odds of having readers who are truly interested in your content,
find your site.
Before detailing the meta tags than can help along the search process, it is
helpful to understand a little more about how searches on the web work.
The search spider. Some of the
search/directory services employ spiders; others don't. The spider is an
automatic agent that goes out and searches the web for anything new. It turns
its results into an index.
The index is a listing of all the content the search service knows about. Some
services, like Alta Vista and Excite, use primarily spider-generated indices.
Others, like Yahoo, are primarily directories.
Directories are compiled,
organized sets of sites. There is typically some human intervention which says
"swamp-lands real estate is a type of business that belongs in the
regional/business category." Directories don't include every single page
on the web but, by limiting themselves, they can often be more useful, if less
comprehensive.
META tags for search engine
indexing
META tags are used to help some search engines index your page, especially if
your page has frames.
META tags should be placed between the <HEAD> and </HEAD> tags of
your document. The most common META tags are going to look like this:
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Use a title </TITLE>
<META NAME="Description" CONTENT="A brief
description">
<META NAME="Keywords" CONTENT="list any and all keywords
here">
</HEAD>
This is all you need in the
"<HEAD>" of your web page.
There are other "META" tags you can put there but they are not
necessary.
Avoiding Indexing
You can also use meta tags to avoid having your page indexed. If your page is
created for a small group of people, if you'd rather not have random browsers
hitting your site, or if your site is live but still under construction or
otherwise not ready for *prime time* viewing, you might not want it to be
indexed.
You avoid indexing by using a meta tag named robots. Not all spiders honor
this meta tag, but several do and more are rumored to be planning on
supporting it. Robots tags looks like this:
<META
NAME="robots" CONTENT="noindex">
Using a robots meta tag and
setting its content value to "noindex" tells the search spider to
skip this page when it builds its index.