Website Style Guide
Index
Content
Architecture
Graphic Design
Writing for the Web
- Presenting Text on
the Web
- Inverted Pyramid Style
of Writing
- Plain and Clear Language
- Sentence and Paragraph
Length
- Hyperlink Text
- Error Message and Form
Validation Text
Microcontent
- Alt Tags
- Page Title Standards
- Meta Tags
- Headings
- Introductory Paragraphs
- Image Filenames
Miscellaneous
- Standardised Text
- Website Directory
Guidelines
- Accessibility Guidelines
- Text as Images
Glossaries
- Glossary of Style
- Glossary of Terms
Meta Tags - Microcontent
Updated: 23rd July 2001
We will only deal with two meta tags in this section, keywords and description.
Keywords
<meta name="keywords" content="Lorem ipsum">
Used by search engines in conjunction with page titles and other microcontent to determine whether this particular page has content relevant to the users search.
Only use words which are relevant to the web site. Using irrelevant words is unprofessional and can be detrimental to the ranking of the web site on search engines.
Phrases are important. It is better to group keywords together in a phrase i.e. "sage accountancy software" rather than "sage, accountancy, software". Search engines will consider the three words as being more relevant as they form a phrase. Searching for "computers" and "engineers" will bring up 1000’s of results but "computer engineers" is a more refined search and will bring up more relevant sites.
Words such as "and", "if" and "a" are superfluous and should be avoided where possible.
Repeat words used in the page title in the keywords meta tag. This will increase their relevancy in search results.
Don’t spam search engines by repeating the same word over and over again in the keywords. Keep your keywords relevant to the subject of the website.
If repeated words are to be used don’t repeat more than 3 times. 5 times or more is classed as spamming. 3 words and less will give you a safe buffer-zone.
Most people type in search words in lower case although for place names (i.e. Newcastle) they may capitalise the first letter. Some search engines are case sensitive, some are not. Those which are not will class Newcastle and newcastle as a repetition and will count against your "limit" of 3 words. Best practice would be to include one entry only and capitalise the first letter.
Try to include any common misspellings of words.
Search engine spiders only read around 200 characters worth of keywords. Try to get your main keywords into this amount of space.
Use geographical locations (i.e. UK, Great Britain) as this can be the most defining word to create a phrase.
Put your keywords above any JavaScript in your <head> tag. This will aid the search engine spiders in finding your keywords quickly.
Some spiders will read root words (i.e. if you have "accounts" and "accounting" they will read "account" from these). This should allow more scope for a variety of words to be used (i.e. we may want to have as keywords, "account, accounts, accounting, accountancy" but may only need to have "accountancy". If space permits, suggest including as many variations as possible. This will be a benefit as not all search engines will read root words and there are no penalties for including these words.
Description
<meta name="description" content="Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet">
A short description, also used by search engines to determine relevancy in a search. This text is often displayed next to the search results.
Keep these to 170 characters or less as search engine spiders only read up to this amount. Try to include your keywords and phrases in your description but try also to be friendly, inviting and informative.
Use the most relevant keywords and phrases at the beginning of the description as many search engines will truncate descriptions after a certain length.
Don’t include any essential information in the description as not all search engines display the meta description with their search results.