|
META Tags Resources
META (<meta>) tags
provide additional information about a web page.
Search engines use some of the <meta> tag
information. Other <meta> tags can be used by
web servers.
Placement of META
tags
Meta tags go in between
the "opening" and "closing"
HEAD tags, before the <body> tag.
Title
Your documents title
will appear in user's hotlists, the banner of most
browsers, and robot-generated lists. It should be a
concise, one-line summary of what the page is about.
Bear in mind that users may not reach your document
through your homepage, but directly using a search
engine or link at another site, so the title should
ideally be self-sufficient.
Description
The Description META tag
is what the search engines that support tags will
display along with your title in their results.
Search engines will often capture the entire Description
tag, but remember when results are displayed to a user
space is limited, usually less than 20 words will
actually appear.
Keywords
The Keyword META tag is
used by the search engines as a means to categorize your
website. Ensure you choose keywords that are relevant to
your site and avoid excessive repetition as many search
engines will penalize your rankings for attempting to
abuse their system.
Author
The Author META tag
defines the author of the document. Supported data
includes the name, email address, company name or
internet address (URL).
Charset
Specifies the character
encoding for the page. This tag is required on each
XHTML page so it will validate properly.
<meta
http-equiv="Content-Type"
content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"
/>
A variety of character
encoding values are available. The one shown is common
and appropriate for most websites.
Language
The Language
META tag declares the natural language of the document
being indexed. Search engines which index sites based
on language often read this tag to determine which
language is supported.
Object Type
Category information of
value to some for search engines or directory indexers.
You have several choices, but the default is document.
Rating
The Ratings META tag tells
the search engines whether the page is acceptable for
all audiences, or adult audiences only.
Robots
The Robots META tag (when
supported) allows you to control which pages you would
like spidered by the search engine robot. You can define
which pages to follow, which to index and which to
ignore completely.
Here are examples of some
of the META Robots tags you can use :
<meta
name="robots" content="index,follow"
/> <== default
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow"
/>
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow"
/>
<meta name="robots" content="index,nofollow"
/>
Revisit
The Revisit META tag
defines how often a search engine or spider should come
to your website for re-indexing. Often this tag is used
for websites that change their content often and on a
regular basis | 
