ALTer Ego: which HTML tags are seen by the search engines

by Serge Bondar

Each trade has its little secrets. Among the SEO community, one of such secrets is the attitude towards optimization of auxiliary tags of the HTML document. Firstly, an experienced SE optimizer, hardened in the constant struggle against Google's updates, goes to a certain "cool-seo-forum-url-here.org" and preaches to his (her) younger colleagues that the search engines don't make any account of META tags; then, under the cover of night, he (she) composes a long and keyword-rich META Description tag for a customer's website.

Who of us optimizers didn't try to get rid of the annoying idea drilling into our brains: if the supplementary tags are useless, why do I write them, and if they are useful, why did I speak in favor of the contrary today on the forum.

The only way out I saw was to resolve this question once and forever by experiment.

How exactly the auxiliary tags influence the rankings of the page is a topic for the further articles. For starters, let's just find out which tags are detected by the search engine robots and which slip out of the scope of their attention. The essence of the experiment is simple – as always: all tags of interest are stuffed with unique keywords that didn't exist before and are just random sequences of symbols especially generated for our experiment. After the pages get indexed, we will query the search engines for these abracadabra keywords.

The experimental pages look just terrible to the human visitors, but that's definitely not their target audience :). And let search engines excuse us – we just work towards better understanding between them and us, and finally, everyone wins.

For the experiment, I've taken the most widespread HTML tags, and here's my result.

As it has been suggested, TITLE proves to be a completely visible tag. I couldn't even discover its visibility limit – after I advanced to stuffing as many as 1000 characters into the title tag, I still could find its complete contents in all of the search engines.

The main META tags – "keywords" and "description" – are still fully indexed by Yahoo, like a good while ago. Google and MSN ignore these elements, although MSN recommends writing the META description on its page for webmasters, and even explains how to do that. I was unable to find the solution to this contradiction.

All the rest of the META tags, notwithstanding our desperate efforts, remained unnoticed by the search engines, which leads us to the conclusion that their use should only obey the site owners' requirements. Both search engines and human visitors disregard their existence. And, consequently, these elements do not have any influence upon the rankings, even when stuffed with keywords over the edge.

Certainly SEs never mind indexing as important and prominent tags as HTML headings (H1 – H6). What I was pleasantly surprised with was how search engines index link text. Whereas Google is famous for relying upon link text as one of the main factors of relevance calculation, the other two engines also show an exciting capability to recognize link anchor text. Thus, querying MSN for the unique keywords contained in link text, I saw not only my page with the link, but also another page that link pointed to, despite of absence of that keyword on the latter page.

The situation with indexing the alternative information of images contained in the ALT tags was rather unexpected. Regardless of the widespread opinion saying these tags are important in the SEO sense – they proved to be completely ignored by the search engines. The exception is Google that reads ALT tags of the images, but I haven't discovered any sings proving its impact upon ranking calculation.

In general, our research didn't reveal any striking surprises. Search engines themselves confess they are addicted to titles, thus leaving META tags open for discussions among search engine optimizers.

Our credits to the source/author of this article: Serge Bondar is a search engine researcher with a several years experience in SEO and millions of hits acquired for his customers' sites accumulated during his career. Since recently, he has been intensively contributing to the development of optimization advice for Web CEO optimization software. In his free time, he enjoys hiking, travelling and writing scientific papers devoted to life of the ants.

Source: http://www.webproguide.com