Study Shows 70% of Enterprise Websites are Missing Important Indexing Tags

Posted on January 21, 1998

SiteMetrics Corporation released the results of their first Enterprise Web Content Survey. The survey examined content on the home pages of 25,000 enterprise Web sites ranging from small ($10 to 50 million in annual revenues) to very large (more than $1 billion) enterprises in 14 different industries.

Overall, the survey found that while more than 96% of the sites surveyed use the common TITLE tag, only 31% include the META Keyword tag used by most of the largest search engines to catalog the Web site. Just 28% of the sites were found to include a META Description tag used by many of the search engines to create the summary description.

The TITLE tag is used by every major search engines to catalog that page in its index. The META Keyword tag helps to improve the cataloging of the page in several of the major search engines including Alta Vista, Lycos, Infoseek, HotBot, Open Text, Northern Light and WebCrawler. Most of these search engines also use the information in the META Description to create the summary for the page.

SiteMetrics Corporation provides Web site visibility and performance measurement services to subscribers. More detail from the SiteMetrics Web Content Survey can be found at www.sitemetrics.com/contentsurvey.