Meta tags 111
Meta element used in search engine optimization
Meta elements provide information about a given Web page, most often to help search engines categorize them
correctly. They are inserted into the HTML document, but are often not directly visible to a user visiting 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 website.
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 website. These consultants used a variety of techniques
(legitimate and otherwise) to improve ranking for their clients.
Meta elements have significantly less effect on search engine results pages today than they did in the 1990s and their
utility has decreased dramatically as search engine robots have become more sophisticated. This is due in part to the
nearly infinite re-occurrence (keyword stuffing) of meta elements and/or to attempts by unscrupulous website
placement consultants to manipulate (spamdexing) or otherwise circumvent search engine ranking algorithms.
While search engine optimization can improve search engine ranking, consumers of such services should be careful
to employ only reputable providers. Given the extraordinary competition and technological craftsmanship required
for top search engine placement, the implication of the term "search engine optimization" has deteriorated over the
last decade. Where it once implied bringing a website to the top of a search engine's results page, for some
consumers it now implies a relationship with keyword spamming or optimizing a site's internal search engine for
improved performance.
Major search engine robots are more likely to quantify such extant factors as the volume of incoming links from
related websites, quantity and quality of content, technical precision of source code, spelling, functional v. broken
hyperlinks, volume and consistency of searches and/or viewer traffic, time within website, page views, revisits,
click-throughs, technical user-features, uniqueness, redundancy, relevance, advertising revenue yield, freshness,
geography, language and other intrinsic characteristics.The keywords attribute
The keywords attribute was popularized by search engines such as Infoseek and AltaVista in 1995, and its
popularity quickly grew until it became one of the most commonly used meta elements.[1] By late 1997, however,
search engine providers realized that information stored in meta elements, especially the keywords attribute,
was often unreliable and misleading, and at worst, used to draw users into spam sites. (Unscrupulous webmasters
could easily place false keywords into their meta elements in order to draw people to their site.)
Search engines began dropping support for metadata provided by the meta element in 1998, and by the early
2000s, most search engines had veered completely away from reliance on meta elements. In July 2002, AltaVista,
one of the last major search engines to still offer support, finally stopped considering them.[2]
No consensus exists whether or not the keywords attribute has any effect on ranking at any of the major search
engines today. It is speculated that it does, if the keywords used in the meta can also be found in the page copy
itself. With respect to Google, thirty-seven leaders in search engine optimization concluded in April 2007 that the
relevance of having your keywords in the meta-attribute keywords is little to none[3] and in September 2009
Matt Cutts of Google announced that they are no longer taking keywords into account whatsoever.[4] However, both
these articles suggest that Yahoo! still makes use of the keywords meta tag in some of its rankings. Yahoo! itself
claims support for the keywords meta tag in conjunction with other factors for improving search rankings.[5] In Oct
2009 Search Engine Round Table announced that "Yahoo Drops The Meta Keywords Tag Also"[6] but informed us
that the announcement made by Yahoo!'s Senior Director of Search was incorrect.[7] In the corrected statement