Some search engines are now indexing Web documents by the meta tags in the documents’ HTML (at the beginning of the document in the so-called “head” tag). What this means is that the Web page author can have some influence over which keywords are used to index the document, and even in the description of the document that appears when it comes up as a search engine hit.
This is obviously very important if you are trying to draw people to your website based on how your site ranks in search engines hit lists.
There is no perfect way to ensure that you’ll receive a high ranking. Even if you do get a great ranking, there’s no assurance that you’ll keep it for long. For example, at one period a page from the Spider’s Apprentice was the number- one-ranked result on Altavista for the phrase “how search engines work.” A few months later, however, it had dropped lower in the listings.
There is a lot of conflicting information out there on meta-tagging. If you’re confused it may be because different search engines look at meta tags in different ways. Some rely heavily on meta tags, others don’t use them at all. The general opinion seems to be that meta tags are less useful than they were a few years ago, largely because of the high rate of spamdexing (web authors using false and misleading keywords in the meta tags).
Note: Google, currently the most popular search engine, does not index the keyword metatags. Be aware of this is you are optimizing your webpages for the Google engine.
It seems to be generally agreed that the “title” and the “description” meta tags are important to write effectively, since several major search engines use them in their indices. Use relevant keywords in your title, and vary the titles on the different pages that make up your website, in order to target as many keywords as possible. As for the “description” meta tag, some search engines will use it as their short summary of your url, so make sure your description is one that will entice surfers to your site.
Note: The “description” meta tag is generally held to be the most valuable, and the most likely to be indexed, so pay special attention to this one.
In the keyword tag, list a few synonyms for keywords, or foreign translations of keywords (if you anticipate traffic from foreign surfers). Make sure the keywords refer to, or are directly related to, the subject or material on the page. Do NOT use false or misleading keywords in an attempt to gain a higher ranking for your pages.
The “keyword” meta tag has been abused by some webmasters. For example, a recent ploy has been to put such words “sex” or “mp3″ into keyword meta tags, in hopes of luring searchers to one’s website by using popular keywords.
The search engines are aware of such deceptive tactics, and have devised various methods to circumvent them, so be careful. Use keywords that are appropriate to your subject, and make sure they appear in the top paragraphs of actual text on your webpage. Many search engine algorithms score the words that appear towards the top of your document more highly than the words that appear towards the bottom. Words that appear in HTML header tags (H1, H2, H3, etc) are also given more weight by some search engines. It sometimes helps to give your page a file name that makes use of one of your prime keywords, and to include keywords in the “alt” image tags.
One thing you should not do is use some other company’s trademarks in your meta tags. Some website owners have been sued for trademark violations because they’ve used other company names in the meta tags. I have, in fact, testified as an expert witness in such cases. You do not want the expense of being sued!
Remember that all the major search engines have slightly different policies. If you’re designing a website and meta-tagging your documents, we recommend that you take the time to check out what the major search engines say in their help files about how they each use meta tags. You might want to optimize your meta tags for the search engines you believe are sending the most traffic to your site.