Meta Tags And How to Use Them
Meta tags are the sections of your HTML that provides for indexing
by robot-driven search engines such as AltaVista and Infoseek.
To get the best rankings possible in the search engines, be sure
to use meta tags in all every web page.
You can have meta tags created automaitcally for you by using our
online
Meta Tags Generator page.
Title
Your page title will appear the banner of most browsers and search engine listings.
It should be a concise, one-line summary of what your page is about containing
several of your primary keywords.
Keywords
This should be a space separated list of keywords for the search engines
to index your page. These words should reflect your site's most important theme.
Some robots look at keywords in context, so it is best to preserve word order
and case, e.g. red wines of Tuscany Italy rather than
Italy red Tuscany wines
Description
The page description is presented along with
the document's title to the user in the result of a search engine query.
Many search engines' robots use the first few lines of text as a description if the
description tag is left out of the page's metatags.
Owner
Legacy value. Some browsers (e.g. Lynx) use this to mail the document author.
Expiry Date (Optional)
The expiry date represents
the date after which the listing may be deleted.
The default is never.
This is also used by Netscape and proxy servers to delete documents from the
cache. If you know your page will go stale, this is a good metatag to use
to insure repeat visitors get the latest page.
Object Type (Optional)
Allows a document to be searched for in a particular category.
Recommended where document is indexed elsewhere (ISSN, Library of Congress, etc.)
Below is a list of possible categories known and accepted by Search Engines:
- Document
- Homepage
- World
- Realworld
- FAQ
- RFC
- Magazine
- Mall
- Dictionary
- Archive
- SearchEngine
- Hypercatalog
- Keybank
- Manual
- Index
- Book
- Database
- Journal
- Catalog
- Linecard
- HOWTO
Revisit Interval (Optional)
The revisit metatag controls how often your document is to be revisited
by search engines that allow for it.
Alos a useful metatag for pages that are updated often.
Rating (Optional)
A complement to (but not a substitute for) the PICS system. It's modeled
after the familiar Motion Picture ratings, to indicate adult content
of a document.
Language (Optional)
Allows a document to be searched for by its text's language.
Dialect (Optional)
Some browsers (Arena, Mosaic-L10N, Netscape) have the ability to perform content
negotiation. What this means is that the user configures the browser to
prefer certain languages based on the users fluency, by
specifying an HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE header. For example, the list
en-CA, en-GB, fr would say that you would accept (in order of
preference) Canadian English, UK English, and French.
Some servers, e.g. Apache,
can use this information to serve a document in the preferred language.
To function properly, the language/dialect combination must be available
to the server.
Charset (Optional)
Charsets may be specified by the server; for instance:
Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-5.
Netscape uses a META
tag to automatically switch fonts, and provided
the server does not parse HTTP-EQUIV META tags into real HTTP headers,
other browsers will ignore it. Thus this method becomes recommended for
non-ISO-8859-1 (Western European) character sets, as it will cause
Netscape to select the correct font for each page.
The default HTML charset is ISO-8859-1 (Western European 8-bit).
Robots (Recommended)
See
The Workshop Report at W3 for the full text on robots
or visit our
Robots and Spiders page for more details.
<META NAME="ROBOTS"
CONTENT="ALL | NONE | NOINDEX | NOFOLLOW">
default = "ALL"
"NONE" = "NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW"
The filler is a comma separated list of terms:
ALL, NONE, INDEX, NOINDEX, FOLLOW, NOFOLLOW.
This tag is meant to provide users who cannot control
the robots.txt file at their sites. It provides a final attempt to
keep their content out of search engines.
INDEX means that robots are welcome to include this page in search engines.
FOLLOW means that robots are welcome to follow links from this page to find other pages.
A value of "NOINDEX" allows the subsidiary links to be explored,
even though the page is not indexed.
A value of "NOFOLLOW" allows the page to be indexed,
but no links from the page are explored.
A value of "NONE" tells the robot to ignore the page.
An example
Now for an example of the beginning of an HTML document (root page if using frames). Your meta tags should look like this :
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-language" CONTENT="en">
<TITLE>Secrets of html meta tags</TITLE>
<LINK REV=made href="mailto:webmaster@supersoft-solutions.com">
<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="search engines secrets html meta tags indexing top ">
<META NAME="description" CONTENT="Meta tags suitable for inclusion in
your HTML document. These tags allow better indexing by robot-driven
search engines, such as AltaVista and Infoseek .
">
<META NAME="rating" CONTENT="General">
<META NAME="revisit-after" CONTENT="15 days">
<META NAME="VW96.objecttype" CONTENT="Document">
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="ALL">
</HEAD>
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