Additional SEO Information
Meta tags
A meta tag is a HTML tag that provides information about a Web page. Unlike normal HTML tags, meta tags do not visibly display on the page. Their purpose is to relay information about the site to the search engine. Meta tag optimization was once a common practice for improving search engine results, and although today it is still used, many experts have deemed it useless.
Tagging and Folksonomy
While meta tags have gone by the wayside tagging, or folksonomy a form of spontaneous cooperative classification has become increasingly popular. Flicker, Delicious and YouTube use folksonomy by allowing users to tag and therefore categorize information. The user generated tags make it easier for search engines to return accurate results for other users because the words used to describe a piece are the exact words that the consumers are using. This is a huge improvement over a non-user trying to guess what words the end user would link to the particular piece.
How it works is users upload content to a site, such as a photo to Flicker. Then they add descriptions so the pictures, then keywords that describe the image are used as tags to categorize the photo.
Why should you care?
It not only allows users to generate content by allowing the public to classify the info, you also learn what the relevant keywords are in your market. Odds are if that’s how they label the content that is how they will search for it too – which means that applying those same key word labels to your URL, keywords, titles and content would be a good idea.
There have yet to be any other direct business uses for tagging and folksonomy, but we should keep our eyes peeled. It’s still relatively new and like other social tools there could be new uses developing at any time.