Help me with META tags!

[bigburb]

I know what META tags do, they basically give search engines a set of keywords right?

How do I get some? What is the best way, do it myself, buy some software, get a service through my web hoster to do it?

I've noticed sometimes when i search something that all the page's text will come up in the description, how is that?

[bathurst_guy]

META tags are basic HTML code. I wouldn't pay for it, it's just a few lines that you code into the HEAD of a HTML document.
Example:

<meta name="robots" content="all" />
<meta name="description" content="This is what we do, human legible text, keep it short and sweet" />

<meta name="keywords" content="place, the, keywords, here, that, best, describe, your, site, and, its, services, seperate, them, with, commas" />

[bigburb]

cool, is there any limit to the length you can put in there?

what about search engine submission?

thanks.

[bathurst_guy]

yes i believe there is a limit, maybe 256 chars (from memory and guess lol) but it will still work even if you go over this.
as for search engine submission... well thats up to you. you can just notify google of your site and it will get to it in its own good time... or you can pay money for other search engines to index it.

[bigburb]

thanks a lot :)

[bigburb]

another question, sometimes when i do a search it won' tjust be some keywords, etc. that show up in the description, it'll show up all of the text in a page (ie when you search for a part number)

are they just putting the first part of their page in the meta keywords or what?

[bigburb]

ok now i have another problem, i did just that, posting the meta tags in the head, and now my borders aren't showing up just on the page that i put the meta tags into. i've even removed the meta tags but my borders still won't show up.

[TechEvangelist]

You are spinning your wheels with keywords in meta tags. None (as in zero) of the major search engines have used meta tags for ranking or keywords for at least several years. A few of the smaller search engines may still use them, but they are useless for Google, MSN and Yahoo.

The description meta tag is used as the description for the page with most search engines. It does not help with rankings.

Read the following article for more info:

Which HTML Meta Tags should I use? (http://www.alpha-ebiz.com/a/a033.php)

The keywords meta tag was originally used in the 1990s to determine the keywords that represent the page, but due to widespread abuse, the search engines stopped using it several years ago.

When you use meta tags, they must be placed in the head section of the page. The ideal spot is just after the HTML title tag.

[mdoigny]

meta title: use up to 65 - 80 characters.
Is nearly worthless, since it duplicates the HTML title tag.
It's used as the title text that appear in the search results.

meta description: short description of the site. Will be displayed as the text in search results.

meta keywords: used to signal the important keywords in the body.
The keywords must appear in the body text, best 2 or three times near the top of the page.
Crawlers don't accept blindly the keywords, but check that they appear in the text too. At least some of the description words must appear in the body too.

[HotShot]

another question, sometimes when i do a search it won' tjust be some keywords, etc. that show up in the description, it'll show up all of the text in a page (ie when you search for a part number)

are they just putting the first part of their page in the meta keywords or what?

Search engines sometimes take snippets of pages, meaning they take about a sentence surrounding the keyword you searched for from the text on a page.
For example:

"White players in upstate New York began playing lacrosse around 1868, and the sport soon ... Two years later, a new National Lacrosse League was formed, ..."

Came up #1 when you search for: lacrosse new york league match
This page has no met description and the search engine result was taken from the page

[nickisme]

A few of the smaller search engines may still use them, but they are useless for Google, MSN and Yahoo.


I'm always confused about whether or not to include meta tags, but if as you say, there are smaller engines that use them then I guess it's still worth the inclusion. I mean, there's no disadvantage with them right?

[EDIT]
Ah, just read your excellent article techevangelist - as you say "When content is pushed further from the top of a script, it holds less relevance to a search engine."

Well, that's answered my question! Ta!