Some topics are so shrouded in mystery, they can divide the very SEO experts themselves. Nowhere is this more true than the ubiquitous meta tag. Sure, you’ve written a fantastic meta description, volunteered some of your more important meta keywords (even if you are unsure how much impact the latter will have).

But what next? What other meta tags should you include? Here are just some of the meta tags I see in wide use on the web:

<meta http-equiv=”content-type” content=”text/html; charset=iso-8859-1“>
<meta name=”keywords” content=”meta tags, rogue meta tags, useless meta tags, dangerous meta tags” />
<meta name=”description” content=”The Manchester SEO Blog guide to meta tags, rogue meta tags and downright dangerous ones.” />
<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”3;URL=http://manchester-seo-blog.co.uk/”>
<meta name=”robots” content=”would you pass the Turing test?” />
<meta name=”title” content=”Redundant Meta Title” />
<meta name=”rating” content=”unsuitable for homosapiens” />
<meta name=”distribution” content=”global” />
<meta name=”publisher” content=”Rogue Meta Tag Technology Ltd.” />
<meta name=”author” content=”John Doe“>
<meta name=”designer” content=”Jane Doe“>
<meta name=”copyright” content=”Rogue Meta Tag Technology Ltd. All Rights Reserved“>
<meta name=”abstract” content=”A brief overview of some of the more useful, the useless and the downright dangerous meta tags people use on their web pages.“>

In this post, I hope to provide you with a brief overview to the jungle of meta tags.

Useful Meta Tags and Robots

<meta name=”robots” content=”nofollow” />
<meta name=”googlebot” content=”noimageindex” />

Some meta tags can be used to give the robots supplemental information about your page and modify their default behaviour. Meta keywords and description have already been discussed. Robots, is highly useful one which you can direct at all crawlers by specifying “robots” or to a specific crawler such as “googlebot”. You can use directives such as: noindex (do not index), nofollow (do not follow links on this page), noarchive (do not store cached copy of page), noodp (do not use DMOZ description), noydir (do not use the description from Yahoo directory). Not all robots are polite, and at the time of writing, only Googlebot, Yahoo and Bing/MSN/Live crawlers respect these directives. Googlebot also supports: noimageindex (do not index images on page), notranslate (do not offer to translate the page) and unavailable_after (will not recommend for search after a particular date)

Other Useful Meta Tags

There are a small number of other useful meta tags, such as:

<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”3;URL=http://manchester-seo-blog.co.uk/”>
<meta http-equiv=”content-language” content=”en-US,fr”>

The first will cause your brower to refresh the page after X seconds (where X is the first number in the content section). You can also specify a URL and use this to redirect your page. But this is the worst kind of redirect, as any SEO expert will say, you are better using a 301 redirect. The second meta tag allows you to specify the language content of the page itself. (see later for multiple language meta tags)

The Redundant Meta Tags

All major Search Engines will ignore meta tags such as: rating, distribution, rating,  author, designer and publisher. You may have your own reasons for including these, but do not expect them to make a difference in your websites rank! Some (such as the ‘rating’ meta tag) were genuinely proposed as a method for allowing webmasters to set the ‘age appropriateness’ of web pages. The difficulty is that without the backing of W3C, it is not standard. Without a set standard, we cannot expect search engines to habitually use meta tags like these. There is also an issue of honesty when reporting on the self :- if you are a webmaster who runs a site, would you wilfully restrict access to your website?

Meta Tags in Multiple Languages

The W3C consortium have proposed a method in which you may specify several different sets of meta tags in different languages within the same page, by using the lang=”" form. For example:

<meta name=”keywords” lang=”en-us” content=”vacation, Greece, sunshine”>
<meta name=”keywords” lang=”en” content=”holiday, Greece, sunshine”>
<meta name=”keywords” lang=”fr” content=”vacances, Gr&egrave;ce, soleil”>
<meta name=”keywords” lang=”ja” content=”空室, ギリシャ, 日照”>

Summary

If in doubt – leave it out! Google and most other search engines will make very good guesses about your page based on the content itself. If you are not sure how to use the meta tag, it is best not to! You may find interesting ways of shooting yourself in the foot by asking search engines to not index or cache your page. It is always better to err on the side of caution, and (as ever) look to W3C as a guide.

…Why Google Announced They Don’t?

One of my favourite passages from Sun Tzu’s ‘The Art of War’ runs something like:

故曰：知彼知己，百戰不殆；不知彼而知己，一勝一負；不知彼，不知己，每戰必殆。(故曰：知彼知己，百战不殆；不知彼而知己，一胜一负；不知彼，不知己，每战必殆。

So it is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you can win a hundred battles without a single loss.

This week Google announced that it did not use the META keywords tag in web ranking, The Manchester SEO Blog investigates the reasons for the timing of this announcement.

Google recently announced that META Keywords do not affect Google’s Web Ranking, and since then the mainstream media has wrongly concluded that META keywords are therefore no longer a part of SEO. If you read (or watch!) Googles blog and video carefully, they never once said that META keywords do not have a role in SEO.

Why Did Google Choose To Announce This Now?

The truly epic scale of these legal law suits became apparent last month with the European Court of Justice stepping in to intervene and back Google up.

What Links These Law Suits to the META Keyword Tag?

So what links all of these law suits to this legendary META keyword tag? Why does Google hope this announcement about META Keywords will somehow alleviate the situation? Well, the amount you end up paying per click with Google AdWords will vary depending on several factors, one of these is the quality score. And (of course!) part of ensuring a high quality score is making sure your website is optimised for the keywords you are campaigning on. While Google may be correct that the META keywords tag does not affect your “web ranking in search results” (Google’s own ambiguous words), there is clearly more to this story than that.

Why Keyword Context is Key to Search Advertising

What the marketing experts of these big companies probably don’t realise, is the importance of context within search advertising. When I’m sat watching TV, the advertiser doesn’t know my favourite areas of interest, I have no choice about the adverts that I watch and the advertiser knows little about their target audience. With a Google search, the keywords I enter indicate my specific area of interest, making it important to match my search with a product that lies within this area.

Lets suppose I searched for ‘cola’, I might be persuaded to buy Pepsi because my search was a little vague. However, if I’ve entered ‘Coca Cola’ (the registered trademark name), this is most likely because I have a preference already and while advertising on competitor trademarks like this might bring a few clicks, they would by unlikely to convert into any healthy level of sales to match the cost of advertising. The added bonus, is the company will have succeeded in compromising the quality of search during this process, which is why many would consider this a black hat SEO technique.

This example may be a little oversimplified, (maybe over used) but the same would be true if I were searching for ‘hotel manchester’ vs. ‘premier inn manchester’. Context is the key!