Does any know if a meta tag of the type

<meta name="title" content="title of webpage">

is used by any Internet-based search engines? If so, could it be used to
increase the keyword count for a page?

My employer recently acquired an Autonomy search engine for its Intranet and
I've discovered that it seems to use the meta title in preference to the
<title> header. Many of our pages (but not ones I am responsible for) are
poorly designed including having <title> headers which are set to the
company name, making them difficult to bookmark, but they do have this meta
tag with a more meaningful value.

For example a page with

<title>Company Name</title>
<meta name="title" content="Real purpose of page">

will show in the results as:

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
*Real purpose of page*
Some text from the body of the page
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Any comments will be appreciated.

anonimulo wrote:

> Any comments will be appreciated.

change the <title> stuff if they are meaningless. And yes, setting every
one of them to the name of the site is quite meaningless.

--
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In alt.internet.search-engines on Wednesday 09 March 2005 01:41, John Bokma
wrote:

> anonimulo wrote:
>
>> Any comments will be appreciated.
>
> change the <title> stuff if they are meaningless. And yes, setting every
> one of them to the name of the site is quite meaningless.
>
Well, all my pages do have sensible titles. It is the rest that don't. When
I complained to the people responsible for the Intranet design guidelines,
I was told that *they* had decided a <title> header wasn't needed.
Presumably they don't expect people to bookmark a page.

Problem is, I am reluctant to complain again in case they notice my own
pages aren't using the company guidelines. Suffice to say that the lack of
guidance on the <title> tag is the least serious fault with the guidelines.

anonimulo wrote:

> In alt.internet.search-engines on Wednesday 09 March 2005 01:41, John
> Bokma wrote:
>
>> anonimulo wrote:
>>
>>> Any comments will be appreciated.
>>
>> change the <title> stuff if they are meaningless. And yes, setting
>> every one of them to the name of the site is quite meaningless.
>>
> Well, all my pages do have sensible titles. It is the rest that don't.
> When I complained to the people responsible for the Intranet design
> guidelines, I was told that *they* had decided a <title> header wasn't
> needed. Presumably they don't expect people to bookmark a page.

With Firefox, and I am sure with IE too, you can rename the bookmark. I do
that often since sometimes the title is not the right description to me.

> Problem is, I am reluctant to complain again in case they notice my
> own pages aren't using the company guidelines.

Which is: adding the extra meta tag? Add it, and then complain :-D I think
your complaint is serious. It saves time when bookmarking.

--
John Perl SEO tools: http://johnbokma.com/perl/
Experienced (web) developer: http://castleamber.com/
Get a SEO report of your site for just 100 USD:
http://johnbokma.com/websitedesign/seo-expert-help.html

In alt.internet.search-engines on Wednesday 09 March 2005 21:26, John Bokma
wrote:

> anonimulo wrote:
>
>> In alt.internet.search-engines on Wednesday 09 March 2005 01:41, John
>> Bokma wrote:
>>
>>> anonimulo wrote:
>>>
>>>> Any comments will be appreciated.
>>>
>>> change the <title> stuff if they are meaningless. And yes, setting
>>> every one of them to the name of the site is quite meaningless.
>>>
>> Well, all my pages do have sensible titles. It is the rest that don't.
>> When I complained to the people responsible for the Intranet design
>> guidelines, I was told that *they* had decided a <title> header wasn't
>> needed. Presumably they don't expect people to bookmark a page.
>
> With Firefox, and I am sure with IE too, you can rename the bookmark. I do
> that often since sometimes the title is not the right description to me.
>
>> Problem is, I am reluctant to complain again in case they notice my
>> own pages aren't using the company guidelines.
>
> Which is: adding the extra meta tag? Add it, and then complain :-D I think
> your complaint is serious. It saves time when bookmarking.
>

My reluctance to get in touch is mainly due to the fact that the guidelines
demand using a standard template, which only works on IE5 or IE6, requires
Javascript to be enabled (none of the links work otherwise), uses absolute
font sizes and text heights, and is visually unappealing - several fonts
and at least 3 styles of link are used. My site, OTOH, is W3C compliant and
accessible, and will work without JS.

However as my site is listed in the search engine, contrary to what I was
told by the Intranet "Centre of Excellence", I will get in touch with them
again, on this matter and also the issue of accessibility.

As regards the Autonomy search engine, optimisation of pages is trivially
easy - it indexes exactly what it sees. No Internet search engine would be
so trusting. Text in titles seems to be given a high weighting, but alt
text and text in links are ignored. OTOH, Autonomy appears not to treat
hidden text differently, so repeating link text as CSS display:none works.
A helpful feature of the search engine is the ability to view the
plain-text cached version - it also means I can't be too "clever" with
hidden text.