Meta element

Meta Elements and their Usage in SEO

– Meta elements can specify HTTP headers for the HTML page served from the web server to the client.
– The ‘meta charset’ element indicates the character encoding of the page.
– Meta tags can be used to describe the contents of the page.
– The ‘meta name=description’ element describes the contents of a web page.
– Meta elements can be used to specify the media type and character encoding.
– Meta elements provide information about the web page for search engines.
– Search engine optimization (SEO) focuses on using meta elements to improve rankings.
– The value of meta tags in SEO is debated among the search engine community.
– Major search engine robots consider many factors in ranking a page, with meta tags being just a portion.
– Search engine ranking rules change frequently, making the role of meta tags in SEO uncertain.

Specific Meta Attributes

– The keywords attribute was popularized by search engines in 1995.
– There is no consensus on whether the keywords attribute affects ranking.
– It is speculated that keywords in the meta can impact ranking if they appear in the page copy.
– Google no longer takes keywords into account for ranking.
– Yahoo! still supports the keywords meta tag along with other factors for search rankings.
– Title tags are the second most important on-page factor for SEO after content.
– Title tags convey what a page is about to search engines.
– Including primary and secondary keywords in the title tag used to be standard SEO practice.
– Title tags are displayed in search results, web browser tabs, and social media links.
– Google has made changes to how much content is shown in title tags.
– The description attribute is supported by major search engines like Yahoo! and Bing.
– Google uses the description attribute when information about the page is requested.
– The description provides a concise explanation of the page’s content.
– It can affect click-through rates on search engine results pages.
– Google does not consider the description meta element as a ranking factor.
– The language attribute indicates the natural language of the website.
– It helps search engines understand in which language a page is written.
– User-agents use language information to select language-appropriate fonts.
– It is useful for websites written in multiple languages.
– The language attribute improves the user experience of the page.
– The robots attribute controls whether search engine spiders can index a page.
– It can prevent a page from being indexed or links from being crawled.
– The noindex value prevents a page from being indexed.
– The nofollow value prevents links from being crawled.
– Other values like noarchive and nosnippet influence how search engines index pages.

Search Engine Usage of Meta Tags

– Google, Yahoo!, and MSN used the title and abstract of the DMOZ listing for website listings in search engine results pages (SERP).
– Microsoft introduced the NOODP value in May 2006 to allow webmasters to specify that the Open Directory Project content should not be used for their website listings.
– Google followed in July 2006 and Yahoo! in October 2006.
– Google reported stopping the use of DMOZ in 2017, rendering the NOODP directive ignored.
– The syntax for the NOODP tag is the same for all search engines that support it.
– Google does not use HTML keyword or meta tag elements for indexing.
– Web sites repeating the same meta keyword may have their ranking decreased by search engines.
– Search engines may ignore the meta keyword element completely.
– Google uses meta tag elements for displaying site links in search results.
– Swiftype considers meta tags as a mechanism for signaling relevancy for their web site search engines.

Redirects and HTTP Message Headers

– Meta refresh elements can be used to automatically refresh a web page or redirect the user to a different location.
– Auto-refreshing via a META element has been deprecated for more than ten years.
– Client-side redirects can interfere with the normal functioning of a web browser’s back button.
– Auto-redirects via markup are not in compliance with the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
– Some modern browsers, like Safari, Mozilla Firefox, and Opera, overcome the back button problem caused by redirects.
– Meta elements with the form ‘meta http-equiv=foo content=bar’ can be used as alternatives to HTTP headers.
– The HTML 4.01 specification allows parsing this tag by HTTP servers, but no web servers currently implement this behavior.
– User agents emulate the behavior of some HTTP headers as if they had been sent in the response header itself.

Alternative Approaches to Meta Elements

– HTML elements like TITLE, ADDRESS, INS, DEL, title attribute, and cite attribute can handle certain pieces of meta data instead of using META.
– A back-of-book-style index for a website can be used as an alternative to meta elements for enhanced subject access.
– ALIWEB used an index file in 1994 to provide information commonly found in meta keywords attributes.
– Authors may decide to use a link element with a proper value for its rel attribute when the content attribute value is a URL.
– For language specification, it is best to use HTTP headers, meta elements, or attributes depending on the situation.