Meta tags appear between the head tags (<head> and </head>) of your HTML document and are used to define meta data (information to describe or define the content on your page).
Meta tags are important for a variety of reasons. Most importantly, they help organize and categorize data on the web. If created properly, meta tags will be extremely useful when XML really begins to become the norm.
Right now, meta tags are probably important to you because you have heard they will get you indexed better in search engines. Well, they can, but you should be aware that having meta tags -- even good meta tags -- will not guarantee you better placement in search engine results. They will simply help in the process.
The META TAGS that we would like everyone at Tufts to use are description, keywords, and date.
DESCRIPTION TAG
The description tag is just that -- a description of the page. If you omit the description tag, search engines will generally display the first content it finds on your page -- which is usually the navigation (e.g., "Home, About Us, Services..."). To avoid having the description of your site show up in search engine results like this, put a description tag in every one of your HTML pages to describe the content on that page. Be sure that the main keywords you use in your description also appear on the page somewhere. Search engines will ignore description tags that appear to have nothing to do with the actual content on the page. In other words, do not put a description like "We are the best department in the country" if you don't have anything on your page that talks about your department being the best in the country.
Tips for the description tag:
- Your description should be no more than 250 words (including spaces, punctuation, etc.).
- Your description should include key phrases and words about your site.
- Put your most important keywords at the beginning of the description. The number of characters a search engine uses from your description varies by search engine. They generally display between 120 to 250 characters.
- Don't use too many "stop words" (a, on, the, etc.) - search engines do not index them and they waste space in your description.
At Tufts we recommend, at minimum, that you use the first sentence of the actual content on your page as your description. If your first sentence is too general, change it. The first sentence should be compelling enough to make a person want to visit the page or site.
KEYWORDS TAG
The keywords tag should be a list of possible keywords a user might submit when searching for information your site contains. Your keywords should repeat keywords that appear in your title and description and most of these words should appear somewhere in the content of your page. Like the description tag, if the keywords you add do not appear in the content of your page, then search engines will ignore them and possibly ban your site (in extreme cases) for doing something referred to as "spam" or "keyword loading."
Search engines are all working on getting rid of 'spam' (or keyword loading). You've seen the search results where the titles of pages come back as nothing but a list of keywords. Loading lists of keywords into your title tag, putting in long lists of invisible key word repeats at the bottom of your page, and the other desperate measures some webmasters go to to attract more traffic, will now get you dropped from several of the search engines, or at least put at the end of the results pages. The search engines are trying to find ways to level the playing field and make it easier for searchers to get real information. Don't get caught 'spamming' or you could wind up with even less traffic. This you don't want. Investigate carefully before doing keyword loading.
Use the keywords tag properly and do not try to "outsmart" the search engines. It will only get you in trouble and it's just bad practice.
Tips for the keywords tag:
- Use plural over singular (if a user types "cat" in the search engine and you have "cats" in your keywords list, your site will also be included in the list of results)
- Put variations and acronyms in your keywords (e.g., employment, vacancies, jobs, careers) and include common spelling mistakes as keywords.
- Don't use commas between keywords. Commas add characters and separate words that may be searched for together and makes repeating keywords harder (search engines do not like repetition in keywords).
- Your keywords should be 1000 characters or less. More will just be ignored.
- Do not repeat a keyword more than three times. Be careful with variations of the same word (cook, cooked, cooking).
- Match important keywords in the body content of the page.
The minimum requirement for the keywords tag at Tufts is that you have the word "Tufts" or "Tufts University" in your list of keywords.
DATE TAG
The date tag is a relatively simple yet important meta tag. The date tag tells us when the document was created or updated. Web Central asks that you use the YYYY-MM-DD format. This is the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) standard: ISO 8601, the International Standard for the representation of dates and times.
Additional Resources:- Meta-Tag Generator - a free Windows application that will generate meta tags for you that you can copy and paste into your HTML documents.
- Back to Basics - META Tags (WebDeveloper.com) - Good introduction.
- How to Use HTML Meta Tags (Search Engine Watch)
