HTML and Meta tags - do they help your website?
HTML and Meta tags - do they help your website?HTML lang tag
The following can help to inform search engine robots on the language of your content, using the HTML tag like this:
html lang="en-GB"
This can help when indexing your website as per language (and may improve your country specific listing too).
You will find more on this here:
http://tlt.psu.edu/suggestions/international/web/tips/langtag.html
and http://www.w3.org/International/articles/language-tags/Overview.en.php
Meta tags
The robots tag - which some recommend using is the robots tag with the content attribute set to NOODP like this:
META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP"
I would suggest you DO NOT use this as it tells the robot NOT to use any of the Open Directory Project descriptions. Think about this logically, the ODP is a human edited directory and is still one of the most trusted sites for website descriptions in the World, and you are telling the robot to not use it. If you were that robot collecting that data you wouldn't then trust that website, and maybe decide to exclude it or flag it for manual checking, either way the outcome is not good. Read more on the GoD (Google official documentation): Google on meta & robots
Do use the the tags:
META "description" CONTENT="Where/why you should host your website..."
META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="UK web hosting, location country, google listings, etc"
But do not over use these and do not expect them to provide you with a massive boost.
So correct HTML can help, as can meta tags but they can also hinder your website, so add them with care. And remember to ensure your website is listed within Google's country-specific saerch results you must host in your native country (or at least be using a country specific domain name, e.g. website.co.uk).
Happy webmastering everyone
Dave.
Labels: googlebot, meta tags, native hosting, robots
2 Comments:
I don’t agree with your argument regarding the NOODP tag, one of the best ways to improve clickthrough is to have a meaningful title tag that best describes your page and entices the searcher to visit your site . I don’t think using the tag will create any trust issues with the search engines, the reasoning behind the introduction of the tag was to dump ODP titles if they were unsuitable, nothing more, nothing less. What is your basis for the lack of trust?
Hi Peter, Thanks reading my post, and thanks for your response.
I agree with your argument but only in part. You are right meaningful tags improve clickthrus and conversions. But to tell googlebot to ignore
ODP (Open Directory Project) could signal trouble, as it is one of the main resources in the World for reliable data (being human edited).
Imagine you are googlebot (still a bit stupid, but getting more intelligent each year) you have to evaluate a page from a website which is telling you to ignore ODP. Now, all you know is that ODP is your only real reliable source of genuine information on this website you can trust. So, as you have a few hundred million other pages to still complete tonight... in a milli-second you must decide to:
- list it using the page's details,
- or flag it as spam [Oh no!],
- or ban the whole site! [Oh bloody no!]
Now, maybe googlebot is more intelligent than this and can categorise a website's content by querying ODP (and other reliable trusted sources) and then know it can safely use the new proposed content as it can check it is related and therefore genuine. Or maybe googlebot aint that far advanced yet....
(this is a simplified view and far more is involved than this such as the trust/pagerank of the origin website)
My concern: as Google is cleaning out the spam and other CRAP (directories of links - my god what shite) from its db and if it can't validate your pages quickly and easily you could find you disappear!
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