isham research
General rule - search engines ignore meta tags. If a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) company offers to "optimise your meta keywords" there are two possibilities - they don't know their business and they're mistaken, or they do know it and they're lying.
Why do search engines like Google, Ask Jeeves and Bing ignore meta tags? Because they try to look at what the user sees - and users don't see meta tags. Most are hangovers from the days before full text searching, when authors categorized their own documents. Many of the meta tags used back then to control how pages were indexed are still legal, but ignored by modern search engines. Some examples follow:
<meta name="description" content="A web page about Blue Widgets.">
If that is what the user searched on, it might be used as the snippet under the page title when the search results are presented. It might not - the search engine might fetch a description from the Open Directory Project or it might build its own. Use grammatical sentences - capital letter and full stop.
<meta name="keywords" content="Blue Widgets, Purple Widgets, Green Widgets">
This is a throwback to when search engines didn't have the compute power or the intelligence to extract keywords from the text. It can be abused - a malfeasant author might put words into the keywords tag that appear nowhere in the text - so most search engines now ignore it. It's still useful for personal discipline, as an aid memoire and to drive some of the analysis utilities. But be aware of: The Meta Keywords Tag Lives At Bing & Why Only Spammers Should Use It
<meta name="abstract" content="A web page about Blue Widgets.">
This is another throwback to the early days of search engines, proposed and implemented a couple of decades ago by none other than IBM - long absent from the search engine market. But you still occasionally see brand new sites with abstracts defined.
<meta name="revisit-after" content="2 weeks">
This is one of the most persistent hoary old myths. It was proposed for an obscure search engine in British Columbia and possibly never implemented even by them. It's doubly wrong, because the original proposal only defined "days".
<meta content="100" name="alexa">
<meta name="serps" content="1, 2, 3, 4, 10, 11, 12, ATF">
This wonderful pair appeared in a satirical article in March 2009. By 23 April they appeared on a site reported to Google Webmaster Help.
<meta name="rank" content="1">
Another one seen in the wild - origin unknown. You have to wonder at the intelligence of anyone who would think it might work - about on a par with those who repeat keywords so as to rank higher for them.
<meta type="keywords" content="celebrity sex tapes,celebrity porn">
Obvious nonsense - "type" is not a legal attribute. But easy even for an experienced (X)HTML author to misswhen scanning the code. Another reason to validate your pages.
<meta·name="SEO"·content="Eye4Design·Active·Media·Ltd"·/>
Again found in the wild and again pointless - the search engines don't recognise the name, and the user can't see it.
<meta·name="allow-search"·content="yes">
One of many fanciful tags. Another urban myth.
<meta name="MSSmartTagsPreventParsing" content="true" />
Another hangover from the past - the "MS" tags were proposed by Microsoft and used in a beta browser - they were withdrawn after negative press.
<meta name="medium" content="video">
Never implemented,but perhaps a good idea. Content="psychic" has been suggested - it would save the search engine bots from visiting at all.
<meta·name="rating"·content="Safe·For·Kids"·/>
There are lots of values for ratings - "general" is another one. Unfortunately, none have ever been supported. But there is a real "Safe for Kids" meta tag,and it looks like this:
<meta http-equiv="PICS-Label" content='(PICS-1.1 "http://www.weburbia.com/safe/ratings.htm" l r (s 0))'>
<meta name="copyright" content="Copyright 2008" />
Copyright is pointless as a meta tag, since no human being can see it and robots can't violate copyright. In fact,in most jurisdictions, you don't need an explicit copyright statement. But consult your lawyer.
Contact Phil Payne by email or use mobile/SMS 07833 654800