Measurement of the presence of keywords and description meta‐tags on a selected number of Iranian Web sites

Abstract

Digital information retrieval has been as a problem, and at the same time a research interest for information scientists in recent years. They have planned some solutions to solve problems manifested during the 1990s. Designing meta‐tags and applying them to HTML documents was a remedy in this direction. Meta‐tags can help authors, publishers and indexers of Web pages to analyze intended content more precisely and efficiently. The aim of the present survey is to measure meta‐tags of the Iranian Web sites in accordance with an international criterion. To carry out the research, 346 Iranian Web sites were selected among 3,342, which represented a sample of all Web sites existed in Iranhoo, an Iranian Web directory. The source codes of the sample home pages were reviewed in terms of the presence of keywords and description meta‐tags. The findings of the survey showed that 31.5 percent and 24.6 percent of the Iranian Web sites have keywords and description meta‐tags respectively. The paper concludes that the Iranian Web sites are lower than non‐Iranian Web sites in terms of the use of meta‐tags.