The fall of Meta Tags
Date: 31/08/2006
Back in the mid-90s, when Take-That! were all the rage and Big Brother was not corrupting our minds with its television garbage, the internet worked in a very different, decidedly simpler way. Meta tags were the dominating element which would make or break a website in the search engines.
Meta tags are contained within the <head> tag of a HTML document. They do not serve any visual purpose to a web page. They exist only to provide basic information to clients (such as search engines) by which their contents can be categorised.
Meta tags can be used as many times as required, and can contain the attributes content (a mandatory attribute), http-equiv and name. The content attribute contains the meta tag's information for transmitting, which in turn is linked to the name or http-equiv attribute. This 'handle/content' logic is used widely throughout HTML and can furthermore be passed onto XML - an increasingly popular language for cross-platform data transmittal.
The name attribute of a meta tag can be anything you wish. Several commonly used names include keywords, description and author. The description meta data is often used by search engines (such as Google and Yahoo!) to display a brief overview of the web page on its results pages. When executed correctly this is perhaps the most useful meta tag; a short, well-produced description can attract visitors to your website.
The http-equiv attribute can be used instead of the name attribute and will make an HTTP header; information passed to the server on which the web page is being hosted. The content attribute can be refresh, content-type or refresh and more. It is perhaps important to note that the latter refresh tag is intended to tell search engines how often to return to your page. However search engines are highly unlikely to listen to this and therefore this content type is not recommended.
To summarise meta tags are only a fraction as powerful as they were in yesteryear. They now barely scratch the surface in the battle for the number 1 spot. If you would like to push your website to the top it is recommended you hire a search engine optimisation professional such as EyePlot Digital. For a free consultation or informal chat about how we could help your company give us a call today on 0870 99 05 188 or e-mail us.
