Meta Tag info

Meta Tag is very important!


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Meta tag use in search engine optimization
Meta elements provide information about a given webpage, most often to help search engines categorize them correctly, and are inserted into the HTML code in the format illustrated above, but are not visible to a user looking at the site.

They have been the focus of a field of marketing research known as search engine optimization (SEO), where different methods are explored to provide a user's site with a higher ranking on search engines. In the mid to late 1990s, search engines were reliant on meta data to correctly classify a web page and webmasters quickly learned the commercial significance of having the right meta element, as it frequently led to a high ranking in the search engines - and thus, high traffic to the web site.

As search engine traffic achieved greater significance in online marketing plans, consultants were brought in who were well versed in how search engines perceive a web site. These consultants used a variety of techniques (legitimate and otherwise) to improve ranking for their clients.

The keyword tag was popularized by search engines such as Infoseek and AltaVista in 1996 and its popularity quickly grew until it became one of the most commonly used META tags. By late 1997, however, search engine providers realised that information stored in META tags, especially the keyword tag, could be unreliable and misleading, and at worst, could be used to draw users into spam sites. (Unscrupulous webmasters could easily place false keywords into a META tag in order to draw people to their site, whether the content matched these keywords or not.)

Search engines began dropping support for META keywords in 1998, and by the early 2000s, most search engines had veered away from reliance on meta elements, and in July 2002 AltaVista, one of the last major search engines to still offer support, finally stopped including them.

Newer search engines like Google and FAST have never had any support for the META keywords tag.

Some academics, e.g. Zhang & Dimitroff, 2004, have concluded that "webpages with metadata elements achieved better visibility performance than those without metadata elements". However, this may be due to confusion between the HTML