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Meta Elements
Meta elements are HTML or XHTML elements used to provide structured metadata about a Web page. Such elements must be placed as tags in the head section of an HTML or XHTML document. Meta elements can be used to specify page description, keywords and any other metadata not provided through the other head elements and attributes.
The meta element has four valid attributes: content, http-equiv, name and scheme. Of these, only content is a required attribute.
Meta element used in search engine optimization
Meta elements provide information about a given webpage, most often to help search engines categorize them correctly. They are inserted into the HTML document, but are often not directly visible to a user visiting the site.
They have been the focus of a field of marketing research known as search engine optimization (SEO), where different methods are explored to provide a user's site with a higher ranking on search engines. In the mid to late 1990s, search engines were reliant on meta data to correctly classify a webpage and webmasters quickly learned the commercial significance of having the right meta element, as it frequently led to a high ranking in the search engines — and thus, high traffic to the website.
As search engine traffic achieved greater significance in online marketing plans, consultants were brought in who were well versed in how search engines perceive a website. These consultants used a variety of techniques (legitimate and otherwise) to improve ranking for their clients.
Meta elements have significantly less effect on search engine results pages today than they did in the 1990s and their utility has decreased dramatically as search engine robots have become more sophisticated. This is due in part to the nearly infinite re-occurrence (keyword stuffing) of meta elements and/or to attempts by unscrupulous website placement consultants to manipulate (spamdexing) or otherwise circumvent search engine ranking algorithms.
While search engine optimization can improve search engine ranking, consumers of such services should be careful to employ only reputable providers. Given the extraordinary competition and technological craftsmanship required for top search engine placement, the implication of the term "search engine optimization" has deteriorated over the last decade. Where it once implied bringing a website to the top of a search engine's results page, for the average consumer it now implies a relationship with keyword spamming or optimizing a site's internal search engine for improved performance.
Major search engine robots are more likely to quantify such extant factors as the volume of incoming links from related websites, quantity and quality of content, technical precision of source code, spelling, functional v. broken hyperlinks, volume and consistency of searches and/or viewer traffic, time within website, page views, revisits, click-throughs, technical user-features, uniqueness, redundancy, relevance, advertising revenue yield, freshness, geography, language and other intrinsic characteristics.
The keywords attribute
The keywords attribute was popularized by search engines such as Infoseek and AltaVista in 1995, and its popularity quickly grew until it became one of the most commonly used meta elements. By late 1997, however, search engine providers realized that information stored in meta elements, especially the keyword attribute, was often unreliable and misleading, and at worst, used to draw users into spam sites. (Unscrupulous webmasters could easily place false keywords into their meta elements in order to draw people to their site.)
Search engines began dropping support for metadata provided by the meta element in 1998, and by the early 2000s, most search engines had veered completely away from reliance on meta elements. In July 2002 AltaVista, one of the last major search engines to still offer support, finally stopped considering them.
No consensus exists whether or not the keywords attribute has any impact on ranking at any of the major search engines today. It is speculated that it does, if the keywords used in the meta can also be found in the page copy itself. With respect to Google, thirty-seven leaders in search engine optimization concluded in April 2007 that the relevance of having your keywords in the meta-attribute keywords is little to none. However, the same article also suggests that Yahoo still makes use of the keywords meta tag in some of its rankings. Yahoo itself claims support for the keyword meta tag in conjunction with other factors for improving search rankings.
The description attribute
Unlike the keyword attribute, the description attribute is supported by most major search engines, like Yahoo and Live Search, while Google will fall back on this tag when information about the page itself is requested (e.g. using the related: query). The description attribute provides a concise explanation of a Web page's content. This allows the webpage authors to give a more meaningful description for listings than might be displayed if the search engine was unable to automatically create its own description based on the page content. The description is often, but not always, displayed on search engine results pages, so it can impact click-through rates. Industry commentators have suggested that major search engines also consider keywords located in the description attribute when ranking pages. W3C doesn't specify the size of this description meta tag, but almost all search engines recommend it to be shorter than 200 characters of plain text
The language attribute
The language attribute tells search engines what natural language the website is written in (e.g. English, Urdu or French), as opposed to the coding language (e.g. HTML). It is normally a 2 letter abbreviation for the language name. It is of most use when a website is written in multiple languages and can be included on each page to tell search engines in which language a particular page is written.
The robots attribute
The robots attribute controls whether search engine spiders are allowed to index a page, or not, and whether they should follow links from a page, or not. The NOINDEX value prevents a page from being indexed, and NOFOLLOW prevents links from being crawled. Other values are available that can influence how a search engine indexes pages, and how those pages appear on the search results. The robots attribute is supported by several major search engines. There are several additional values for the robots meta attribute that are relevant to search engines, such as NOARCHIVE and NOSNIPPET, which are meant to tell search engines what not to do with a Web pages content. Meta tags are not the best option to prevent search engines from indexing content of your website. A more reliable and efficient method is the use of the Robots.txt file (Robots Exclusion Standard).
NOINDEX tag tells a search engine not to index a specific page. NOFOLLOW tag tells a search engine not to follow the links on a specific page. NOARCHIVE tag tells a search engine not to store a cached copy of your page. NOSNIPPET tag tells Google not to show a snippet (description) under your a search engine listing, it will also not show a cached link in the search results
Additional attributes for search engines
NOODP
The search engines Google, Yahoo! and MSN use in some cases the title and abstract of the Open Directory Project (ODP) listing of a Web site for the title and/or description (also called snippet or abstract) in the search engine results pages (SERPS). To give webmasters the option to specify that the ODP content should not be used for listings of their website, Microsoft introduced in May 2006 the new "NOODP" value for the "robots" element of the meta tags . Google followed in July 2006 and Yahoo! in October 2006.
The syntax is the same for all search engines who support the tag.
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP">
Webmasters can decide if they want to disallow the use of their ODP listing on a per search engine basis
Google: <META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOODP">
Yahoo! <META NAME="Slurp" CONTENT="NOODP">
MSN and Live Search: <META NAME="msnbot" CONTENT="NOODP">
NOYDIR
Yahoo! also used next to the ODP listing the content from their own Yahoo! directory but introduced in February 2007 a meta tag that provides webmasters with the option to opt-out of this
Yahoo! Directory titles and abstracts will not be used in search results for their pages if the NOYDIR tag is being added to a Web page.
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOYDIR">
<META NAME="Slurp" CONTENT="NOYDIR">
Robots-NoContent
Yahoo! also introduced in May 2007 the attribute value: class="robots-nocontent". This is not a meta tag, but an attribute and value, which can be used throughout Web page tags where needed. Content of the page where this attribute is being used will be ignored by the Yahoo! crawler and not included in the search engine's index.
Examples for the use of the robots-nocontent tag:
<div class="robots-nocontent">excluded content</div>
<span class="robots-nocontent">excluded content</span>
<p class="robots-nocontent">excluded content</p>
Internal Links
With all the talk out there about linking, one might be under the impression that the only links that count are those from other websites. While these links certainly play an important role these are certainly not the only important links.
When you're about to launch into your link work, why not stop and consider the ones that are easiest to attain and maximize first. That would be, the ones right there on your own site and those which you have total and complete control of. Properly used, internal links are like highways between your content where the search engine spiders stop and go.
The internal linking structure can:
- Insure that your website gets properly "spider-ed" and that all pages are found by the search engines
- Build the relevancy of a page to a keyword phrase
- Increase the Page Rank of an internal page
Simply changing your internal navigation will not launch your site to the top of the rankings however it's important to use each and every advantage available to create a solid top ten ranking for your site that will hold it's position.
Internal links will get your pages doing better, they will help get your entire site spidered, they will help increase the value of internal pages and they will build the relevancy of internal pages to specific keyword phrases.
Lead the spider to your content
We have seen websites that, once the search engines find all of their pages, you find that they are ranking on the first page and seeing traffic from phrases they never thought to even research or target.
This may not necessarily be the case for you however. Having a larger site with more pages related to your content will boost the value of your site overall. You are offering this content to your visitors, so why hide it from the search engines ?
Pages can be hidden from search engines if the linking is done in a way that they cannot read. This is the case in many navigation scripts. If your site uses a script-based navigation system then you will want to consider the implementation of one of the internal linking structures.
Additionally, image-based navigation is spiderable however the search engines can't see what an image is and thus, cannot assign any relevancy from an image to the page it links to other than assigning it a place in your website hierarchy.
Pyramid Effect Of Internal Links
While we will be discussing PageRank (a Google-based term) here; the same rules generally apply for the other engines. The closer a page is in clicks from your homepage, the higher the value (or PageRank) the page is assigned. Basically, if you have a page linked to from your homepage it will be given more weight that a page that is four or five levels deep in your site.
This does not mean that you should link to all of your pages from your homepage. Not only does this diffuse the weight of each individual link but it will look incredibly unattractive if your site is significantly large.
Figure out what your main phrases are and which pages will be used to rank for them and be sure to include text links to these internal pages on your homepage. It is important to pick solid pages to target keyword phrases on, as you don't want human visitors going to your "terms and conditions" page before they've even seen the products.
If that hosting company noted above has a PageRank 6 homepage, the pages linked from its homepage will generally be a PageRank 5 (sometimes 4, sometimes 6 depending on the weight of the 6 for the homepage). Regardless, it will be significantly higher that if that page was linked to from a PageRank 3 internal page.
External Links aka Backlinks
Backlinks (or back-links (UK)) are incoming links to a website or web page. In the search engine optimization (SEO) world, the number of backlinks is one indication of the popularity or importance of that website or page (though other measures, such as PageRank, are likely to be more important). Outside of SEO, the backlinks of a webpage may be of significant personal, cultural or semantic interest: they indicate who is paying attention to that page.
In basic link terminology, a backlink is any link received by a web node (web page, directory, website, or top level domain) from another web node (Björneborn and Ingwersen, 2004). Backlinks are also known as incoming links, inbound links, inlinks, and inward links.