META Tags or what are officially referred to as Metadata Elements, are found within the section of your web pages. META Tags are still relevant with some indexing search engines. You should utilize your META Tags in accordance with the W3C - World Wide Web Consortium Metadata Specifications and those of the search engines you are targeting.
The following is a partial list of metadata elements that may be used in the overall site structuring, organization, and search engine marketing strategy.
We've provided HTML Comments (look for this ) in the source code to help you understand the metadata elements referenced in this series of topics.
1. TITLE Element - Page Titles
Every html document must have a TITLE Element in the head section. Some refer to the element as a meta tag (title tag) when it is not.<br />
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<title>META Tags Tips - Metadata Elements
To see an example of where the title element is placed in the html, view the source code of this web page. Look at the very top of the page right after the opening tag.
2. META Description Tag
Some search engines will index the META Description Tag found in the section of your web pages. These indexing search engines may present the content of your meta description tag as the result of a search query.
3. META Keywords Tag
The META Keywords Tag is where you list keywords and keyword phrases that you've targeted for that specific page. There have been numerous discussions at various search engine marketing forums surrounding the use of the keywords tag and its effectiveness. The overall consensus is that the tag has little to no relevance with the major search engines today.
4. META Language Tag
In HTML elements, the language attribute or META Language Tag specifies the natural language. This document is mostly concerned with how to specify the primary language(s) (there could be more than one) and the base language (there is only one) in HTML documents.
5. META Link Relationship Tag
It is helpful for search results to reference the beginning of the collection of documents in addition to the page hit by the search. You may help search engines by using the link element with rel="start" along with the title attribute. The META Link Relationship tag is part of the metadata that appears within the section of your web pages.
6. META Robots Tag
The Robots META Tag is meant to provide users who cannot upload or control the/robots.txt file at their websites, with a last chance to keep their content out of search engine indexes and services.
* META Robots Tag for Googlebot
Googlebot obeys the noindex, nofollow, and noarchive META Robots Tags. If you place these tags in the head of your HTML/XHTML document, you can cause Google to not index, not follow, and/or not archive particular documents on your site.
* META Robots Tag for MSNBot
MSNBot obeys the noindex and nofollow Robots META Tag. Placing these tags in the heading of your HTML document prevents MSNBot from indexing or following specific documents.
7. META Revisit-After Tag
The revisit-after META tag is not supported by any major search engines, it never was supported and probably never will be. It was developed for, and supported by, Vancouver Webpages and their local search engine searchBC.
8. META Tags Abuse and Misuse - Metadata Structuring and Standards
This is a search engine marketing article published by our System Admin (Edward Lewis) that discusses the use of HTML Comments Tags and proprietary metadata elements.
9. DC Dublin Core META Tags - DCMI Dublin Core Metadata Initiative
The Dublin Core metadata element set is a standard for cross domain information resource description.
10. HTML Comments Tag
HTML comments are not metadata but, are typically found in the section of web pages. HTML comments can be utilized anywhere within your documents HTML structure.
There has been a myth that has perpetuated over the years where keywords and keyword phrases listed inside HTML comments tags would add a boost to the overall relevancy of the page. This is not true.
