Search Engines and The Meta Description Tag
点击次数：35 次 发布日期：2008-11-23 19:11:01 作者：源代码网
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源代码网推荐The Meta deion tag is a snippet of HTML code that belongs inside the Head section of a Web page. It usually is placed after the Title tag and before the Meta keywords tag, although the order is not important. 源代码网推荐The proper syntax for this HTML tag is: META NAME="Deion” CONTENT="Your deive sentence or two goes here.” 源代码网推荐I used to believe that the purpose of the Meta deion tag was twofold: to help the page rank highly for the words that were contained within it, as well as to provide a nice deion in the 源代码网推荐search engine results pages (SERPs). However, today it appears that, similar to the Meta keywords tag, the information you place in this tag is *not* given any weight in the ranking algorithms of Google, and only a tiny amount of weight in Yahoo’s. 源代码网推荐In other words, whether you use your important keyword phrases in your Meta deion tag or not, it won’t affect the position of your page in the SERPs for the words that are important to you. In fact, you could easily leave it out altogether. But should you? 源代码网推荐Well, if you’re already happy with the “snippets” of text that the search engines post from your page in any given search query, then there’s no reason to have a Meta deion tag on your pages. 源代码网推荐However, it’s important to note that the snippet the engines use will vary, depending on what the searcher typed into the engine. 源代码网推荐Let’s take a step back and look at what the search engines show in the SERPs. It can get a little bit confusing, but if you try out your own searches in the various engines, you’ll have a better idea of what I’m talking about. The search engines are constantly changing this sort of thing, plus they all behave in slightly different ways, as you’ll see in my examples. 源代码网推荐At Google, if you search for a site by URL like this: www.highrankings.com, the snippet you see is the first instance of text on the page. Interestingly enough, on my home page, an image alt attribute tag is the first instance of words “on the page,” and that’s what shows up as part of my “snippet” for this particular search. (The image is a clickable image, so this jibes with my other theory of Google indexing the words in the alt attributes of clickable images. See this forum thread from Dec. 2003. 源代码网推荐For this type of search, Yahoo displays the Meta deion info. It’s important to note that generally the only people searching using URLs are site owners trying to see if their pages are indexed. 源代码网推荐Therefore, you shouldn’t worry too much about what you see under those circumstances. 源代码网推荐So let’s try something that a real person might search for when looking for what I have to offer – how about “SEO copy"? 源代码网推荐In Google, my Nitty-gritty handbook page shows up second in the results with the following snippet: 源代码网推荐“… techniques: Search engine optimization (SEO) consultants who need to edit the existing copy of their clients’ sites as a matter of course. …” 源代码网推荐Not the best of snippets, to say the least. 源代码网推荐In this case, I don’t have the phrase “SEO copy” in my Meta deion tag, nor is it anywhere on the page as a complete phrase. Because of this, Google has simply found instances where the word SEO and the word copy were near each other, and used the surrounding text as the snippet. 源代码网推荐Now, if I felt that “SEO copy” was a viable keyword phrase that people might be searching on, I may want to adjust my page accordingly so that the phrase appeared in my Meta deion tag as well as 源代码网推荐somewhere in the body text. Again, this is not because it would help it to rank highly, but because I would receive a more suitable deion that was more in tune with what the searcher was looking 源代码网推荐for. One can surmise that they might be more inclined to click on my listing in that case. 源代码网推荐Let’s look at Yahoo for the same phrase. They’ve ranked the page at #3, and used the following snippet: 源代码网推荐“Learn SEO copywriting with Jill Whalen’s special report – The Nitty-gritty of Writing for the Search Engines.” 源代码网推荐Now that’s a good snippet! Well, guess what? That’s my Meta deion tag for that page. Even though the exact phrase wasn’t in the tag, and neither was the word “copy,” Yahoo still chose to display it for this search query. I’m guessing this is because that phrase is actually nowhere on the page, other than in the Title tag. So with Yahoo, having a decent Meta deion tag was very worthwhile in this instance. 源代码网推荐More Tests 源代码网推荐I also recently discovered that when I tested a nonsense word in the Meta deion tag of a page (with the word not appearing elsewhere on the page), Google did not find it. But when I added the word to the visible text copy on the page, Google would bring up the test page when the nonsense word was searched for. Not only that, but it displayed that part of the Meta deion tag where the nonsense word appeared. 源代码网推荐In Yahoo, my nonsense-word test page was found, even if the word appeared only in the Meta deion tag and nowhere else on the page. Interestingly enough, however, Yahoo didn’t display the part of the tag where the word was placed. They displayed only the beginning of the deion, and cut it off after about 45 words. I purposely placed my nonsense word deep into my deion tag to see if it would get picked up. In this case, the word appeared as the last of 138 words in the tag. I’ll probably add even more words at some point to see if there’s any cutoff point where Yahoo will stop indexing. 源代码网推荐 源代码网推荐Other Engines 源代码网推荐I also tested a few searches at Teoma and MSN. Each engine is slightly different in how they display the Meta deion tag. Teoma seems to find the words in the tag, but doesn’t necessarily 源代码网推荐display them. When I searched for a unique sampling of text from one of my tags, Teoma found the page, but chose to display the first sentence on the page instead. Not surprisingly, the current MSN 源代码网推荐search worked the same as Yahoo. However, MSN’s search technology preview (which is the new engine they’re working on) behaved similarly to Google on all tests regarding Meta deions. 源代码网推荐My new recommendation for this tag is not to worry too much about it. If you have some great call-to-action statements utilizing your keyword phrases on your Web pages, they will probably show up in your snippets at the engines. But since it’s easy enough to create a compelling sentence or 2 that incorporates your main keyword phrases, you might as well do this for your Meta deions. 源代码网推荐Certainly, the more control you have over your listing in the SERPs, the more clickthroughs you should see. If your Meta deion tags can help with that, then it’s certainly worth the time to create 源代码网推荐compelling, keyword-rich ones. 上一页12 下一页 源代码网供稿. |
