Intellectual Property Law

Today's eCommerce lesson: There's no upside to using others' trademarks in your website meta tags

By McKee, Voorhees & Sease, P.L.C.

Those who have a passing familiarity with website design are probably familiar with the concept of meta tags.  Meta tags are pieces of data included in the HTML code of a webpage that provide information regarding the content of the page.  You can view the code of a webpage you are visiting by clicking the "view" menu and, in IE, selecting "source," or in Firefox, selecting "page source."

Keyword meta tags have been used frequently in the practice of SEO, or search engine optimization.  This essentially is an industry designed to get a webpage to show up higher in search results for various key terms and phrases in order to make it easier for the website to be found by customers.  SEO practices frequently included loading the meta tags of a site with numerous keywords and phrases in an effort to improve a site's search performance for those terms.

Click below for a discussion of what happens when trademarks are used in connection with this practice, and why website owners would be best served avoiding such use.

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Full post as published by FileWrapper on September 22, 2009 (boomark / email).