Advantage and disadvantage of meta tags
The World Wide Web consortium’s (W3C) official definition of HTML (hypertext mark‐up language) includes the meta‐tag (Craven, 2001a). Meta‐tags are non‐displaying, or hidden HTML tags that may provide site owners and authors with a degree of control over how a Web page is indexed (Henshaw, 1999; Henshaw and Valauskas, 2001). “Meta” is the Greek for “over” (Kirsanov, 1997), and the “meta” in “meta‐tags” arises from the term “metadata”, which means data about other data. For example, a meta‐tag may describe the content of a Web page. That description is data about other data, i.e. the Web page. Any Web page can have a variety of metadata associated with it (Sullivan, 1997).
The description meta‐tag is used to describe the Web page. It will be displayed when a user enters a query and the search engine retrieves some of the relevant Web sites. If there is no descriptive paragraph at the start of the document, the description meta‐tag should be used. But if there is a descriptive paragraph, the description meta‐tag is better omitted, because it is likely that, when updating, one of the duplicates will be forgotten (Richmond, 2002). It is particularly useful for documents with a small amount of text. A number of keywords should be included in the description, and the most important ones should be near the beginning of the description (Craven, 2001b).
Without this meta‐tag, search engines usually take the first two lines of text found on the site and use them as the description. It is recommended that the description be limited to 20‐25 words, or about 150‐200 characters of text (Christensen, 1999; Henshaw, 1999.
There is a serious problem with the keywords meta‐tag. This problem is called “spamindexing”, “spamdexing”, or “spamming”. It refers to the misuse of the keywords meta‐tag. Misuse includes repeating keywords over and over or using words which really have nothing to do with the Web site but are of interest to people, e.g. “sex” (Humphreys, 1999).
References
Christensen, D. (1999), “Golden retrievers”, School Library Journal, Vol. 45 No. 11, pp. 38‐41
Craven, T.C. (2001a), “Description meta‐tags in locally linked Web pages”, Aslib Proceedings, Vol. 53 No. 6, pp. 203‐16.
Craven, T.C. (2001b), “Description meta‐tags in public home and linked pages”, LIBRES: Library and Information Science Research Electronic Journal, Vol. 11 No. 2, available at: http://libres.curtin.edu. au/LIBRE11N2/craven.htm
Henshaw, R. and Valauskas, E.J. (2001), “Metadata as a catalyst: experiments with metadata and search engines in the Internet journal, First Monday”, Libri, Vol. 51 No. 2, pp. 86‐101.
Humphreys, N.K. (1999), “Mind maps: hot new tools proposed for cyberspace librarians”, Searcher, Vol. 7 No. 6, p. 10
Kirsanov, D. (1997), “HTML unleashed PRE: strategies for indexing and search engines: the meta‐tag”, available at: http://webreference.internet.com/dlab/books/html‐pre/43‐2‐2.html
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