Rising to the Top: Evaluating the Use of the HTML META Tag to Improve Retrieval of World Wide Web Documents through Internet Search Engines

Abstract

We evaluate the effectiveness of using the HTML META tag to improve retrieval of World Wide Web documents through Internet search engines. Twenty documents were created in five subject areas: agricultural trade, farm business statistics, poultry statistics, vegetable statistics, and cotton statistics. Four pages were created in each subject area: one with no META tags, one with a META tag using the keywords attribute, one with a META tag using the description attribute, and one with META tags using both the keywords and description attributes. Searches were performed in AltaVista and Infoseek to find terms common to all pages as well as for each keyword term contained in the META tag. Analysis of the searches suggests that the use of the keywords attribute in a META tag substantially improves accessibility while use of the description attribute alone does not. These results suggest that HTML document authors should consider using keywords attribute META tags. We also suggest that more search engines index the META tag to improve resource discovery.