Web Design - The Complete Reference: Chapter 9: Search

<meta> Tags

Many search engines look at the <meta> tags for keywords and descriptions of a page's content. A <meta> tag like

<meta name="Keywords" content="Butler-1000, Robot butler, Robot butler specifications, where to buy a robot butler, Metallic Man Servant, Demo Company, robot, butler" />

could be used in our example page about robot butlers. Notice how the content started with the most specific keywords and phrases and ended with generic keywords. This should play into how most users approach search engines.

Once a search engine looks at the <meta> tag, it may rate one site higher than another based upon the frequency of keywords in the content attribute. Because of this, some designers load their <meta> tags with redundant keywords:

<meta name="Keywords" content="Robot butler, Robot butler, Robot butler, Robot butler, Robot butler, Robot butler, Robot butler, Robot butler, Robot butler, Robot butler" />

However, many search engines consider this to be keyword loading and may drop the page from their index. If the keyword loading is a little less obvious and combinations of words and phrases are repeated,

the search engine may not consider this improper. An even better approach is to make sure the pattern of repeating words isn't quite as obvious, as shown here:

However, be aware that search engines may still notice the heavy use of certain words or phrases and consider this spamming, potentially reducing the page's ranking or dropping it from the index completely.

Search engines also look at the description value for the <meta> tag. For example,

would be included on the robot butler page and could be examined by the search engine, as well as returned by the search engine on the result page. Because the <meta> tag description may be output for the user to see, provide some valuable information in the description that will help users determine if they want to visit your site. Preferably, keep the description to a sentence or two and, at most, three or four sentences.

Next: Titles and File Naming

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