23 March 2009 | Author: R. Falconer SEO Consultant
As Search Engine Optimisers, we're regularly asked questions about meta data. An interesting meta data question is "From an SEO point of view, should my web site's new content management system be able to include custom meta elements?" The answer is an unequivocal "yes" but the reasons are more varied than you might think.
The meta data in question is the data in the head element of a page that exists within the meta element. Eg.
During the late nineties this meta information was one of the main sources of information that search engines used to categorise web pages. Webmasters at the time caught on to this pretty quickly and started to stuff their meta descriptions and meta keywords with all sorts of terms, both relevant and irrelevant, to the extent that they became far less useful.
Search engines have moved on a lot since then. These days, a far more complex list of factors is now used to rank pages. Google claims not to use meta keywords at all. So why is the meta element still useful for SEO?
Firstly, one of your biggest pieces of search engine "real estate" is the snippet which is displayed under the page title. This is taken from the description attribute and is your chance to sell the page to the user as the one they should click ahead of the others in the results. In short, it's a chance to directly encourage people to view your site - and how many of those chances do you get?
In the absence of a description or for a number of other reasons, search engines can decide to use information from the Open Directory Project or the Yahoo! Directory in this space. Since this data may be years old and irrelevant, it's a good idea to tell them not to. You can use the robots attribute to do this.
Maybe you have pages that you don't want indexed such as low value dynamic pages or internal search result pages. The robots attribute can also be used for this as well as a number of other functions. The language attribute can help target your page to a specific geographic area and the meta element can be used to verify your site with tools such as Google Webmaster Tools or Yahoo! Site Explorer.
Meta keywords were one of the main tools of a mid-nineteen nineties spammer. They hold little value for search these days but are still indexed by Yahoo!. And it's always wise to remember that there is still life outside Google. Yahoo! has been gaining market share recently and search is continually evolving, who knows what type of search engine might use the keywords in future?
No-one knows for sure what the future holds and this is the main reason you should have full control of your meta and other elements. HTML is developing all the time, search engines continue to introduce new tags and attributes to help webmasters have their sites indexed as accurately as possible. In 2007, Yahoo! introduced a way of using the class attribute to allow webmasters to indicate that they don't want a certain part of the page indexed. This year we've already seen the three main search engines introduce what has become known as the canonical tag. Again, it doesn't use the meta element but it is evidence that search engines continue to look for ways to allow sites to communicate what they want indexed in order to improve search results. The customisable nature of the meta element makes it a perfect tool for this.
Google is ahead of the game, solving a number of issues with Webmaster Tools. But if all the main search engines could have combined, as with they did with the canonical tag, these issues could have been fixed universally. Geographic targeting (telling search engines which country's search results that pages with a non-country specific top level domain should appear) could have been fixed with something like:
Currently, geographic targeting is less than perfect and involves providing as many "clues" as possible to the search engine to ensure it works to your intentions. Obviously this is far from ideal.
The canonical tag was a big step forward in search engine co-operation which has helped webmasters, search engines and searchers alike. Let's hope this is a model for future use of meta data to solve search engine indexing problems. Returning to the original question, the most important reason for requiring full control of your meta data is to allow you to use whatever tools search engines decide to introduce. Future-proofing your site in this way may avoid expensive site development and keep you ahead of the competition.
Why we still need the meta element for SEO
Why we still need the meta element for SEOAs Search Engine Optimisers, we're regularly asked questions about meta data. An interesting meta data question is "From an SEO point of view, should my web site's new content management system be able to include custom meta elements?" The answer is an unequivocal "yes" but the reasons are more varied than you might think.
The meta data in question is the data in the head element of a page that exists within the meta element. Eg.
During the late nineties this meta information was one of the main sources of information that search engines used to categorise web pages. Webmasters at the time caught on to this pretty quickly and started to stuff their meta descriptions and meta keywords with all sorts of terms, both relevant and irrelevant, to the extent that they became far less useful.
Search engines have moved on a lot since then. These days, a far more complex list of factors is now used to rank pages. Google claims not to use meta keywords at all. So why is the meta element still useful for SEO?
Firstly, one of your biggest pieces of search engine "real estate" is the snippet which is displayed under the page title. This is taken from the description attribute and is your chance to sell the page to the user as the one they should click ahead of the others in the results. In short, it's a chance to directly encourage people to view your site - and how many of those chances do you get?
In the absence of a description or for a number of other reasons, search engines can decide to use information from the Open Directory Project or the Yahoo! Directory in this space. Since this data may be years old and irrelevant, it's a good idea to tell them not to. You can use the robots attribute to do this.
Maybe you have pages that you don't want indexed such as low value dynamic pages or internal search result pages. The robots attribute can also be used for this as well as a number of other functions. The language attribute can help target your page to a specific geographic area and the meta element can be used to verify your site with tools such as Google Webmaster Tools or Yahoo! Site Explorer.
Meta keywords were one of the main tools of a mid-nineteen nineties spammer. They hold little value for search these days but are still indexed by Yahoo!. And it's always wise to remember that there is still life outside Google. Yahoo! has been gaining market share recently and search is continually evolving, who knows what type of search engine might use the keywords in future?
No-one knows for sure what the future holds and this is the main reason you should have full control of your meta and other elements. HTML is developing all the time, search engines continue to introduce new tags and attributes to help webmasters have their sites indexed as accurately as possible. In 2007, Yahoo! introduced a way of using the class attribute to allow webmasters to indicate that they don't want a certain part of the page indexed. This year we've already seen the three main search engines introduce what has become known as the canonical tag. Again, it doesn't use the meta element but it is evidence that search engines continue to look for ways to allow sites to communicate what they want indexed in order to improve search results. The customisable nature of the meta element makes it a perfect tool for this.
Google is ahead of the game, solving a number of issues with Webmaster Tools. But if all the main search engines could have combined, as with they did with the canonical tag, these issues could have been fixed universally. Geographic targeting (telling search engines which country's search results that pages with a non-country specific top level domain should appear) could have been fixed with something like:
Currently, geographic targeting is less than perfect and involves providing as many "clues" as possible to the search engine to ensure it works to your intentions. Obviously this is far from ideal.
The canonical tag was a big step forward in search engine co-operation which has helped webmasters, search engines and searchers alike. Let's hope this is a model for future use of meta data to solve search engine indexing problems. Returning to the original question, the most important reason for requiring full control of your meta data is to allow you to use whatever tools search engines decide to introduce. Future-proofing your site in this way may avoid expensive site development and keep you ahead of the competition.
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