Metatags tips
Metatags
should appear in the header section of the HTML code of each web
page. The top of the html code should look like this:
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Giant advertising balloons</TITLE>
<META NAME="KEYWORDS" CONTENT="Giant,advertising,balloons">
<META NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="Giant advertising balloons
really get your products noticed. Product replicas for
promotional and marketing campaigns. 123 Bounce!">
<META NAME="AUTHOR" CONTENT="Simon Conroy, Acorn Internet">
</HEAD>
Generator -
indicates the software used to create the web page and is
used by some software brands to measure how popular their
product is.
<META NAME="generator" CONTENT="program name and version">
Title -
this gives the page a name to identify it on search engines, and
in your bookmarks or favorites list. The most common title
is.....you guessed it No Title. Many sites use the companies
business name in the metatags which is fine to get the site
found on a search for Smith Bros & Sons, but not if you want to
be found by new customers who are searching for generic products
or services. It is useful to include your favorite keywords in
your title, preferably at the start, as this carries lots of
weight when it comes to ranking a site withsearch engines.
<TITLE>Your title here</TITLE>
Description -
These metatags should contain your description of your web
page. This is generally what people see when your page is listed
in search results. Try to make the description enticing to
encourage viewers to click on your link. Again include your main
keywords within the description metatags.
<META NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="Your description here">
Keyword -
These metatags are where you list those words or terms you want
to be found under. Try to keep the list short and seperate each
word or phrase with a comma. Consider using foreign language
variations of your main keywords to attract searches from
non-English speaking clients. Do not repeat keywords more than
twice as this can be considered spamming by some engines.
<META NAME="KEYWORDS" CONTENT="Your keywords here,
keyword1,keyword2">
Author - Who wrote the web
page.
<META NAME="AUTHOR" CONTENT="Your name here">
Robots - Instructions for
search engine spiders to either look at (index) or not (noindex)
and to follow the links on the page (follow) or not (nofollow).
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="index,follow">
or <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="noindex,follow">
or <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="index,nofollow">
or <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="noindex,nofollow">
Copyright -
Used to identify the copyright holders of the web page.
<META NAME="copyright" CONTENT="This page and its contents are
copyright 1998-1999 by Simon Conroy. All Rights Reserved>
Revisit -
Instructs proxy servers to re-cache your page after the
specified time. Useful if your page content changes regularly.
These metatags don't tell search engine spiders to come back,
they do that when good and ready.
<META NAME="REVISIT-AFTER" CONTENT="15 days">
Refresh -
Instructs browsers to redirect to another page. This happens
after a number of seconds specified in the content value.
Setting that value to "0" will create an instant redirect.
Bewaresearch engines don't like these refresh tags.
<META HTTP-EQUIV="REFRESH" CONTENT="5; url=yourpage.html">
Expires -
This tag instructs the visitors cache to refresh after the
number of days indicated in the content value. This can be set
to "0" if you have regularily updated content and want each
visitor to be presented with the most up to date content.
<META HTTP-EQUIV="expires" CONTENT="15">
Rating -
This tag assigns a content rating to the page and can be set to
general, 14 years, restricted or mature.
<META NAME="rating" CONTENT="general">
