For small businesses launching sites on the World Wide Web, cyberspace might as well be deep space. With millions of Web pages out there, how will customers ever find theirs?
Unlike nationally known firms, such as Honda or Pepsico, whose domain names are their corporate names, small businesses depend on the ability of Internet users to find them through search engines, using keywords and plain-text phrases. Now there’s a new tool to ensure your page won’t be overlooked or misinterpreted in the indexing process.
Metatags, a string of commands in Hypertext Markup Language, the language of Web-site creation, make pages more easily retrievable by certain search engines, but, Web designers and technicians warn, they are not a magic solution and they can be abused.
Chip Janiszewski, national sales manager for Internet Business Consulting Inc., a division of Tolland, Conn.-based TownUSA (www.TownUSA.com), says using metatags has made a big difference for all sorts of small businesses he works with, including a food association, a manufacturer of speciality steel parts, a contractor, a printer, an architect, and numerous retailers and not-for-profits.
“I ask the customer to think up all the words and phrases they want to be associated with,” Janiszewski says, “We then design those into the title and headlines, and in metatags as well.”
Janiszewski says he has observed that “metatags definitely get you higher up in the search results list.”
For many smaller businesses, who are taking a new gamble in advertising on the Web, more hits can mean more revenue, so employing metatags can translate to dollars, at least according to Mike Tangsolo, whose Web-site-design company, Tangible Solutions (www.tangibles.com), based in Odenton, Md., uses metatags in every site he designs.
“As most transactions on the Internet start with a potential customer searching through one of, say, 10 major search engines, you can see why we as designers want to make sure we are near the top of the selection list.”
Tangsolo says he has found that using metatags can basically insure that a site comes up in the top 100 sites, and usually the top 50, and that puts these sites and companies into the serious net-business playing field.
“One way to make money on the Internet is by having a great site, and the other is being found,” Tangsolo says. “What the metatags are designed to do is get more hits, and increased hits equals increased revenues.” Tangsolo hosts a $49 online marketers workshop at (http://www.uni-sol.com/workshop) where metagging is discussed at length and a “meta ranger script will check your metatags free if you are a member.”
In addition to identifying products and services, metatags can also be used to identify the creator of the page, what HTML specs the page follows, and to set the refresh parameter, which can be used to cause the page to reload itself, or to load another page.
Of several types of metatags, the most important for search engine indexing are description and keyword tags. Description tags deliver a description of the page instead of the summary the search engine would ordinarily create. Keyword tags provide additional keywords for the search engine to associate with your page.
In addition to helping users locate Web sites, metatags also can keep people out. If privacy is an issue, you may want to employ a type of metatag known as a “robot tag.”
On some search engines, pages are indexed mechanically by robots, and these tags can prevent them from finding your page/site. Using robot tags allows you to specify that a particular page should not be indexed by a particular search engine.
Robots, also known as Web crawlers, Web wanderers, spiders or ants, are computer programs used by certain search engines to scan the hypertext structures of the Web and “intelligently” retrieve referenced and indexed documents. Some Web browsers do not use robots, they use humans to do their daily search-and-find operations on the net. But for those that do, and more and more are incorporating them, a metatagged site has a better chance of being called up.
Metatags are best used to designate the purpose of a particular Web site that might not wear its real identity in its address. For example, a personal Web site of an individual who has a business selling rare stamps could be metatagged with numerous stamp collecting-related words and phrases. This way people interested in stamp prices, stamp conventions, stamps for sale and trade or the history of stamps, could locate this individual’s site, even if its general site name is simply “Joe’s Web Site.”
Designers say that metatags, which are used to go beyond free-text searching to a more indexed style of searching, are particularly good for a number of common dilemmas in Web design. They can clearly denote the contents of sites that are heavily graphical or filled with art, for example. They also can prevent common search dilemmas. For example, if one wanted to do a search on biogenetics, an engine that doesn’t search metatags might pull up a site, for instance, that turns out to be about a movie that mocks biogenetics.
An engine searching metatags will look to the “subject” tag, and if the subject is “biogenetics” it will select it with a type of electronic “confidence” that cannot be otherwise obtained. This eliminates all sorts of common searching confusions.
Some search engines can use metatags and some cannot and as new search engines are being developed all the time, it is an ever-changing landscape. Two of the better-known search engines that do access metatags are Altavista and Infoseek.
But metatags can be abused, and some search engines ignore them.
A spokesman for the search engine Excite said, “Our spider doesn’t honor metatags. We believe our decision protects our users from unreliable information.”
One common form of metatag abuse is known as “spamming the index” and involves repeatedly inputting a single keyword or phrase in a metatag to increase the chances of getting a high score from a Web spider.
Another problem that has come up with respect to metatags is tagging your site with the name of somebody else’s product. Since metatags are invisible, it is not always obvious when someone has done this. This year the law firm of Oppedahl & Larson filed a lawsuit against several companies that used its name within metatags.
“Don’t expect metatags to necessarily be enough to put you on a Top 10 list,” says Stan Friedman, Web designer and New York City librarian. “Metatags are mainly a design element you can tap into; they are a crutch for helping information-poor pages be better acknowledged by the search engines.”
More and more people are finding metatags useful to make their pages speak a little louder in the din of cyberspace. And small businesses in particular have nothing to lose and everything to gain by employing them.
