A practical guide to meta tags - NAME or HTTP-EQUIV?
by Andrei A
META
tags are a way for you to define your web page and web site to the
outside world. You can declare the keywords and description, which help
your placement in search engines. In addition, you can specify who owns
the copyright, how often the page is to be visited by search engines
and many other useful pieces of information.
Please
understand that META tags are just notes, little snippets of
information that you chose to put into a page, for informational
purposes. META tags are not necessarily recognized by search engines as
vehicles for ranking, although some still do read them and use them.
Also, search engines (especially Google) constantly change their views
on META tags and constantly make decisions whether to even read them,
or totally disregard them.
Important
side note: Many make the mistake of putting the TITLE tag into the META
category. Folks, the TITLE tag is not a META tag, but a crucial element
of every web page. If your page does not have a title, it becomes one
of the 30 million meaningless Untitled Documents.
So are
there any tags that make a difference in terms of search engine
placement?
The
misuse of META tags was the main reason for which search engines do not
rely on them so heavily any more. Unscrupulous webmasters used META
tags to mislead the search, in order to artificially inflate the number
of visitors. In the past, META tag optimization was the key-point in
any search engine optimization strategy. Today, other factors (like
link popularity) are far more important. Many SEO (Search Engine
Optimization) gurus tell you not to ever again bother with META tags,
totally forget they ever existed and focus on links.
My
personal opinion is, if it matters only 0.05%, then why not use them,
since it's just a simple "type and forget" deal anyway and does not
require that much work? Similarly to the stock market and investing
strategies, a tiny 0.05% can actually help in the long run. In today's
competitive internet, where your site is just one out of billions,
every bit helps.
Several
Web search engines, such as InfoSeek and AltaVista, still recognize
META elements with NAME values "description" and "keywords". The words
listed in a "keywords" tag might be used (and perhaps emphasized) when
indexing documents. However, generally such keywords are useful only if
they occur in the normal text of the document too, and in that case you
can expect the keywords extracted from your page's text to be used in
indexing anyway!
This is
exactly why, you will see an increasing amount of SEO community folks
telling you to stop even thinking that the "keywords" tag ever existed.
I am
more of a conservative nature when it comes to SEO and my philosophy is
that whatever page element is not known for sure to penalize your
search engine ranking, should be left, just in case things change, or
even just for some smaller and less important or known search engines
(the entire world seems to be concerned solely with Google today) might
actually help you in the long run. Basically, all I'm saying is don't
put all your eggs in one basket.
Keywords
are separated by commas and may be considered case sensitive by search
engines. If the same keywords are repeated too often in the META
element, some search engines will not index the document. Search
engines typically only process the first 1000 characters of the
keywords list. So, if you use keywords, do it carefully, as this is one
element that can actually get you penalized.
On the
other hand, a "description" tag should be used, since many (but not
all) search engines show this info as the abstract for the document
when returning query results. But you should also take into account
that many search engines just take the first few words of the document,
so you might include a short summary into the document body right after
the main heading.
To avoid
being truncated (that is, cut) by search engines, the description
should be brief - no more than 200 characters.
Let's
clear one more common confusion: The META tags affect the way your
document is indexed when it is included into a data base of a search
engine. However, it will not make a robot find the document when it
searches candidates for inclusion into a data base. Therefore, if you
think the document is important, and especially if there are not
several links to it in other documents, consider submitting those pages
to the search engines manually.
When I
first started studying META tags and took a closer look, my first
question was why some pages use the META NAME format, while others use
META HTTP-EQUIV for the same stuff.
Here is
the technical explanation of the difference between the two formats.
Afterwards, I'll try to translate this into English.
Begin
technical explanation:
The
difference between NAME and HTTP-EQUIV is that the latter has a special
significance when documents are retrieved via HTTP, whereas the
interpretation of NAME attributes is up to each particular browser or
other program which processes HTML files (although some common
practices may emerge and might be standardized later). HTTP servers may
use the property name specified by the HTTP-EQUIV attribute to create
an RFC 822 style header in the HTTP response. (RFC 822 is the
electronic mail protocol used on the Internet.) The header name (which
is case insensitive) is taken from the HTTP-EQUIV attribute value, and
the header value is taken from the value of the content attribute.
The
HTTP-EQUIV attribute may be used in place of the NAME attribute to
indicate that the property is an HTTP header. Some servers will send
the HTTP header specified in the META element, and browsers often
recognize the header even when it is not sent by the server.
Note:
While HTTP-EQUIV META tag appears to work properly with some browsers,
other browsers may ignore them, and they are ignored by Web proxies,
which are becoming more widespread. Use of the equivalent HTTP header,
as supported by e.g. Apache server, is more reliable and is recommended
wherever possible.
HTTP
headers may be generated by CGI scripts, and in Apache and CERN httpd
by using a side file containing metadata. Other servers may have other
mechanisms to generate headers. Note that certain server-generated
headers may not be overridden (such as Date), and that others are only
meaningful with a non-200 status code. Using an HTTP header is
preferable to using META tags, since the header will be understood by
cache agents and proxies in addition to browsers, and metadata (such as
PICS data) may be associated with image files, sound files, etc.
End of
technical explanation.
Ok, if
you read the above and got it, then you should be building rocket ships
or playing with nanobots and not be reading silly articles! For the
rest of us, here is a very basic translation:
The
HTTP-EQUIV is for headers sent to your browser by the server after a
request for a page/file has been made. In plain English, this
information may direct/control how your page will be displayed in a
browser.
The NAME
attribute is there to provide additional information about the document
(such as keywords, description, author information, copyright
information and so on).
There is
still a disagreement between many people about with which attribute the
keywords and the description should go.
My
personal advice is to use both! Be careful, because if you use a design
tool, it will generate the tags only in one format. In that case, I
would just copy the generated block of info, duplicate it on the page
(do it just after the original, so you don't mess up the page's
coding), then change NAME to HTTP-EQUIV on the duplicates if the
originals were NAME, or HTTP-EQUIV to META, if the originals were
HTTP-EQUIV. Again, you don't get penalized for doing this, and until
the world comes to an agreement, you are covered both ways!
Andrei
co-owns bsleek ( http://www.bsleek.com ) – a site that specializes in
web hosting, design, promotional items, printing, CD Presentations and
more. Andrei is on the Board of Consultants for Daterade.com and has
amassed an extensive technical knowledge and experience through his
career as the CIO for a major travel management company and through his
past careers in military research, data acquisition and aerospace
engineering.
Andrei A may be contacted at http://www.bsleek.com
