Ask The Web Developer

The Importance of Meta Tags

Meta tags are an important part of the web programming process. In this first part of the series, we are going to take a look at some of the different tags you should be using in your code.

First, it's important to understand what meta tags are. They are elements that are used to provide metadata about a web page. These tags are placed in the [head] part of the code. These elements are used to specify keywords, page description, authorship, robot/crawler instructions, etc. These tags are important to help search engines crawl your site and therefore help in search engine ranking.

Meta Description Tag

This is a very important tag and shouldn't be left out of your code. It is used to provide the search engines with a short and concise description of that particular page. Yes, that means that each page of the site should have a different description. That will help immensely with your page ranking. This description should generally be kept to about 160 characters. With the advent of Twitter, it shouldn't be hard to come up with a page description in the same amount of space it takes you to tweet about your breakfast. Look at the image below. This is a screen print of the description that is displayed when you search for my site, Flying Tomato Design. You'll note that the description for the home page is too long - it gets cut off. So, I need to change that. However, you'll notice that the description tag for the contact page is a great length.

Meta Keywords Tag

The keywords tag used to be vital to a website. Originally, it was intended as a way to tell search engines the main concept of your site with specific words. However, it didn't take long for web developers to figure out that they could manipulate the search results. Eventually, you would search for "giraffes" and somehow you'd come up with a porn site.  It was because people were putting high ranking keywords in their code whether or not the content actually supported it.  Today, search engine companies don't really use keywords.  However, Yahoo! does put some sort of emphasis on it still.

Meta Robots Tag

This tag tells the search engines whether or not it should follow the links appearing on that page.  If you already have a [robots.txt] file, there's no need for this tag.  Here are the common commands used with the Meta Robots Tag:

• noindex:  this tells the spider not to index that page
• follow: tells the spider to follow the links on that page and index them
• nofollow: tells the spider to not follow the links on the page, but index the page

Other Tags

Here's a list of other tags to use in your code.  These are pretty self-explanatory so I don't want to spend a whole lot of time on these.

• <meta name="Copyright" content="Copyright Flying Tomato Design: 2007-2009" />
• <meta name="Author" content="Flying Tomato Design" />
• <meta name="Email" content="office@flyingtomatodesign.com" />
• <meta name="Charset" content="UTF-8" />
• <meta name="Distribution" content="Global" />
• <meta name="Rating" content="General" />
• <meta name="Revisit After" content="1 Day" />

Conclusion

So, in conclusion, most Meta Tags are still important today.  They help with your search engine ranking and placement.  However, other tags, such as the Keywords tag isn't so useful any more.  In our next post, we'll look closer at the Keywords Tag in more detail; why it was so great to begin with, and what search engines do with it now.