Meta tags are
one of the ways in which you can effectively control a summary
of your site that will be used by a search engine to check it's
relevance to a users query. Although not supported by all search
engines they are worth adding to your HTML documents nonetheless.
Meta tags are hidden away in your code and are therefore not
visible to your viewers, unless of course they choose to take
a peek at your page source.
You should note that the inclusion of meta tags is no guarantee
that your pages will suddenly leap to the top of every search
engine listing. However, they do help describe your pages
to search engines that make use of meta information.
There are three important tags that are worth adding to every
HTML document you create. The first is the title tag and is
used by some search engines to list your site. The trick here
is to make your title a brief description of the page contents
rather than simply your company or site name. Keep your title
short and do not include any non-letter characters such as
®, ©, &, etc.
The description tag returns a description of your page in
place of the summary a search engine would otherwise create
from the first few lines in the body text. Keep your description
to one sentence and try and include some important keywords
that are highly relevant to the page.
The third meta tag is the keywords tag. This provides important
keywords for a search engine to associate with your page.
If you use repetitive keywords and phrases (known as keyword
spamming) many search engines will refuse to list the page
in question and you may risk having your entire site banned
by them. Most search engines allow up to 150 keywords and
phrases. However, less is better as it increases the density
of the few keywords you carefully chose and a search engine
will bump up your listing as a result. You could try using
keyword phrases in other languages especially if your site
has international appeal. Try not to repeat a specific keyword
more than twice. If you do avoid listing them next to each
other and always use the plural. For example, if your keyword
is 'tag' and someone searches for 'tags' your site may not
be listed, on the other hand if you use the keyword 'tags'
and someone searches for 'tag' you will. Also remember to
use lowercase letters and separate each keyword in the tag
with a comma.
Not as important is the robots tag which is used to guide
a search engine robot or spider. The default for the robots
attribute is "all". This would allow all of the
files on your page to be indexed. The attribute "None"
would tell the spider not to index any files and not to follow
any hyperlinks on the page to others. "Noindex, follow"
would mean that the spider is free to follow the links from
this page to other pages, but not index the page itself. Whereas
"index, nofollow" would allow the page to be indexed,
but the links would not be followed.
Other none essential tags include the name of the page author,
his/her email address and a copyright statement. The later
is a useful inclusion because to view web pages browser programs
actually download page elements onto a persons computer where
they can be easily saved and reused. The category and rating
tag is self explanatory. Choose a category that best describes
the broad theme of your site and a rating to suit.
The refresh tag is quite special and is used only in circumstances
when you want to automatically redirect visitors to another
page. This tag is useful if you move a page but expect a number
of your visitors to go looking for it at the old address because
their favorites or a search engine listing hasn't been updated.
This tag can also be used to create simple effects such as
displaying a splash screen that automatically moves the viewer
on.
Statistics tell us that only around 21% of web pages use
meta tags. Therefore if you use meta data you may get ahead
of competitors that don't utilise it. To give your site an
added edge produce new meta tags tailored to every page you
create, then if allowed submit each to your chosen search
engine. By doing this you will hopefully get many individual
listings each pointing towards a specific area of your site.
Don't forget to place your meta tags between the <HEAD>
and </HEAD> tags before the body of the document and
make sure each meta tag runs on a single line of HTML code
with no line breaks. Search engine spiders can stumble on
a meta tag that is placed on multiple lines and may not read
it correctly. This is how meta tags look in a HTML document:
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Title goes here</TITLE>
<META name="title" content="title goes here
again">
<META name="description" content="your description
goes here">
<META name="keywords" content="your keywords
go here">
etc..........
</HEAD>
<BODY>
For more information on meta tag definitions try The
Dictionary of Meta Tags.
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