Tutorial

Meta Tags Tutorial

There are a couple of things that we are assuming that you have done BEFORE you start this tutorial:

1. Decided on a product or service to sell
2. Have built a web site
3. Have a domain name
4. Have a good idea as to who your target audience is

Q. But why are we assuming that you have already done these things?
A. Simply because for the purpose of this tutorial we are using Meta tags purely for search engine positioning, nothing else.

This of course begs the question, for the newbie at least, of what can we do with Meta tags and what can they do for us?

There are quite a few different meta tags available to us as a developer and they offer different functions, for example the keyword and description tags are critical and will allow us to control (to a certain extent) how search engines see our sites whereas others allow us to specify the language that our site(s) are written for or even how the search engines should look at our site.

But enough rambling, lets get down to business.
For the purpose of this tutorial we will be concentrating on three of the Meta tags available to us:

1. Keyword
2. Description
3. Robots

As you are probably aware (have you read the article that goes with this tutorial?) we use Meta tags to help the search engines decide how best to list our sites i.e. in which categories and using which keywords.

The syntax for the keyword and description tags is:

< Meta name="description" content=" ………….. “>
< Meta name="keywords" content="…………….. “>

For demonstration purposes we will be using EBay as our example, this is simply because everyone knows who EBay is and they have the number one ranking in Yahoo for the keyword ‘EBay’ (surprisingly enough).

We will start this tutorial with an example before moving on to your site.

The image below shows the top part of a browser window which is at the Ebay.com site.

Note the title of the site; seems a bit long-winded right?

Yes, it is long-winded, but now let’s look at the EBay Meta tags:

<meta name="description" content="Buy and sell electronics, cars, clothing, apparel, collectibles, sporting goods, digital cameras, and everything else on eBay, the world’s online marketplace. Sign up and begin to buy and sell - auction or buy it now - almost anything on eBay.com.">

<meta name="keywords" content="eBay, electronics, cars, clothing, apparel, collectibles, sporting goods, eBay, digital cameras, antiques, tickets, jewelry, online shopping, auction, online auction">

<title>eBay - New & used electronics, cars, apparel, collectibles, sporting goods & more at low prices</title>

The first thing we notice about the EBay meta tags is that they are long, the second and more important thing that we notice about them is that both the keywords and description tags feature most of the words from the sites title and also reference the site url several times.

Now that we’ve seen a set of tags that work well lets consider your site.
The first thing we need to do is identify what it is that you’re trying to sell.
You should try and break this down into single words or word pairs, so for example ‘E-books’, ‘Consulting services’, ‘Plastic bags’, etc.

From the EBay example we see that they are selling:

electronics, cars, clothing, apparel, collectibles, sporting goods, eBay, digital cameras, antiques, tickets, jewelry, nline shopping, auction, online auction

Note that the keywords are case insensitive and separated by commas.

The keywords that you specify in your keywords tag are the words that the search engines will index your site under, so for example if you wanted to find EBay and tried searching on ‘Online auction’ you’d find it, where as if you search on ‘sporting goods’ you’ll still find EBay, but it will not be in the first page or two of returned results.

Now that we’ve established that it is actually the key words that the search engine will index our site by we should probably mention how these are weighted (importance).

When the search engine crawls your site it is looking not only at your keywords but the density of your keywords and relevance of the keywords.

In simple terms this means how often do your keywords occur in the body of your page, your title and your description and how relevant to the title/url are the keywords?

The next tag that we’ll examine is the description tag. This tag is used to provide the search engine with the description of your site.

As we can see from the EBay tag good practice is that your tag should be written in a professional manner, i.e. miss out phrases like ‘wow, dead good, my site is brilliant’ and encompass as many of your keywords, title words and your own url.

This point about professional writing relates primarily to credibility (comparable to who you’re listed next to).

It should be noted that although the title is not considered to be a meta tag it is considered very highly and is also used as the source text when a user adds a site to the ‘Favorites’ and also as the buy line when your site is returned from a search.
There is of course one thing that you should be aware above all else and I can’t stress this enough:

META TAGS ARE NOT THE ANSWER TO ALL OF LIFES PROBLEMS!

Why do we say this, well frankly it’s because we’re trying to be honest with you. Although a good set of tags is going to help get you listed and in the category that you want to be listed in it is not going to get you a fantastic page ranking on it’s own (unless you’re the only person who’s using a given set of keywords – which is pretty unlikely). The subject of improving you page ranking will be dealt with in future tutorials and this is one of those things that will take some time.

Now that we’ve burst the bubble on overnight dreams coming true by using Meta tags alone I should probably also mention another point.

ROME WASN’T BUILT OVERNIGHT – AND YOUR SITE WONT BE CRAWLED OVERNIGHT! (probably)

The search engines index on a given schedule, if you deploy your site just after Yahoo/Google has performed a main crawl it might be up to a month before you’re found (the next major crawl).

Q. How do I know if I’ve chosen complete garbage as keywords or if I’m on to a winner?
A. This is obviously a very pertinent question. You may well have chose brilliant keywords – but then so have all of your competitors and so there’s 2,000 sites all going for the keywords ‘money’,’cash’,’free’

So in essence, given that they’ve all got higher page rankings than you there’s no way you’ll get seen. So when you have your list of keywords written down you need to check them. The banner ad below is for a company called word tracker, this is service that I use and can recommend. They also have a free trial (so you don’t actually have to spend any money and can play for hours). I suggest that you finish reading this tutorial and then visit this site and try your keywords.

Before moving on we’re going to assume that you’ve misread, speed read or not read the accompanying article for this tutorial and re-state a point.

The search engines crawl the web using ‘robots’, the are said to ‘spider’ or ‘crawl’ web sites and build indexes built on what they find. They do this by following links, so one page to another, one site to another – via links.

With this in mind the last section that we’re going to cover in this tutorial is the Robots Meta tag.
The robots tag is used to tell the crawling agent what to do, at the page level, with a given page.
For instance it is possible to stop the crawler indexing a page, visiting a page or caching a page.
So, the robots tag looks like this:

< META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="……..”>

And should look like:

Follow indicates that the crawler should follow links

Index indicates that the crawler should add content to its index

Cache indicates that the crawler should not store the description

On top of the Robots tag there is also a robots file (robots.txt) in which the developer may list all of the items on the site that are not to be indexed; this subject is not being covered as this is becoming less important with each iteration of search engine (but if you want to know, go to yahoo and search on ‘robots.txt’).