Understanding Metadata and Links

View the source code of any website and you will see Meta tags near the top of the page. The purpose of these tags is to provide information about the page to search engines. As you may have guessed this can be abused to communicate to search engines what you want them to believe, rather than the truth.

The truth is search engines have become more sophisticated and now index pages are based on their actual content and not the web designer’s Meta tags. The long and the short of this process is that meta tags have practically no impact on your search engine ranking. The most common meta tags are “Descriptions”, “Keywords”, “Robots”, “Generators” and “Revisit-after”.

The old technique meant stuffing websites with “keyword” tags with specific keywords. Today this is more likely to do more harm than good. The most valuable tag methods should always include “Descriptions”.

Resources of different types may have metadata associated with them. Metadata and resources are often available on the World-Wide Web. Resource discovery and indexing can be performed by automated agents who traverse hyperlinks between Web objects.

In cases where the resource or the metadata do not support hyperlinks which are being used, links in the HTTP protocol header may be used in place of these specific links located in the body.

Examples of such resources include JPEG images and PDF documents. This technique may also be used to express an indexing agent to index a page under an alternate URL. This may be useful when direct search engine results to the correct HTML frameset. This may have navigation tools, advertisements and or other materials linked with the resource.

• The Title tag – while the Meta tags have next to no impact on your ranking, it is essential to get the title tag right. This tag is placed in the heading section alongside the Meta tags. Search engines use the contents of the title tag as the title of your listing, including your main keyword in your title tag; it will also help you to boost your natural ranking.
• Incoming links – search engines, particularly Google, rank results on three main criteria. The first is relevance. This is mainly about getting your content to match the search phrases used by your potential customers. By acquiring links from other relevant sites, you will improve your ranking considerably. Your aim here is to get incoming links from authoritative sites. There are lots of techniques such as: providing free information that interests visitors, offering discounts or indeed paying the site for a link.
• Outgoing links – If you have owned a website for any length of time, you have probably received emails asking to exchange links. If you are offered a link exchange by a site with a higher Page Rank than you, then generally speaking you should accept it as long as the outgoing link is likely to be of interest to your visitors. All the outgoing links should be set to launch in their own browser tabs.

Users have a short amount of hours in one given day.  It appears that getting your content optimized means you can submit yourself to a main search engine and directory. Users can then focus on a PPC campaign and Meta Tags that have a practicular impact on your SEO. By all means put your main keywords in, but don’t expect any significant benefit. This memo describes a method which may be used with existing servers and software, and it is readily available to most Web authors.