Search Keywords
Metadata is the term used to describe additional information
about a web page, such as the author of the page and
a summary of the page contents. This information is grouped
into sections called metatags which are hidden from view in the
code of the web page.
The 'keywords' metatag stores a list of keywords which
relate to the content of the page and are historically used by
search engines to match the most relevant page to the words that a
person types into a search engine.
Most search engines no longer use metadata when crawling
websites to compile their indexes (including Google,
Yahoo, Lycos and Altavista) and now ignore the
content of the keywords metatag due to misuse of the tag by
some websites. We have found that keywords can greatly
improve the accuracy of searches carried out by users of
our website.
One of the main reasons for the greater accuracy is that
some of the search engines do not correctly interpret the
information that is present in the text of the page. For
example someone searching for pothole will get different
results to someone searching for potholes, due to the way search
engines interpret plurals, and so we have decided to
include relevant keywords on our web pages to cover a range of
possible search words a user may enter.
This helps to ensure that users of our site are taken to the
correct page when they search, making it easier for them
to access the content and services we provide and making our
website more user-friendly.
Allerdale Borough Council
