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| Summary of Content |
| A few notes on Meta Tags and also a table of available tags with descriptions and examples. I know they aren't meant to be that important anymore in the 'ranking' stakes, judging by the comments you see on the web, but I've found that they still have their uses. |
| Links | ||
| Robots Metatag | A tutorial on using the Robot tag. Control the crawlers. | 11/2004 |
| Analysis site links |
| These links will provide a useful On-line Analysis of your own Site - Seomasters , GetonFast or Websitesubmit. I would suggest using more than one, for a more balanced view. |
Web Site Analysis According to some users survey, 84.8% of Internet users are using search engines to find web sites. Statistics show that if your web site does not appear in first three pages of search results, people are very unlikely to find you. The chances are that hundreds or thousands of Internet users per month use search engines to look for what you offer - so achieving a good ranking is a crucial step to maximising your sales online. About Meta Tags To perform on search engines a web site must contain important elements called “Meta tags”. These tags are not shown to visitors – they give instructions to search engines, offering keywords to index your web site against, and information such as your desired title for your listing. See the end of the report for an example showing how Meta tags should be formatted. You can see if your Meta tags are present by selecting “Source” from the “View” menu in Internet Explorer. This shows you the underlying code which forms your web site. Meta tags should be inserted within the header section of this code, near the top. The three most important tags are detailed below TITLE Tag:
DESCRIPTION Tag:
KEYWORDS Tag:
About Link Popularity When another web site publishes a link to you, many search engines including Google give you a higher profile. If you can provide useful free advice or information on your web site, other website owners may link to you spontaneously. However, website owners seeking links often invest significant time and effort to negotiate link exchanges with other web sites. As a rough guide, a moderately established website might have 250 links. The highest-linked website online to date is Amazon.com with over 50 million links. About Google Page Ranking Google keeps a "Page Ranking" score for every web page in its database. Simply put, the higher your Page Ranking (PR) the greater your potential for top positions against any relevant search. Google’s PR ranges from zero to ten. A PR of zero means the web page is unlisted or even blacklisted, and PR of ten would indicate a very high profile site indeed. |
| List of Metatags, Example and Description | ||
| Note the keywords "HTTP-EQUIV", "Name" and "Content" are case-insensitive. Their values are also case-insensitive. | ||
| Tag Name | Example(s) | Description |
| Author | <META NAME="AUTHOR" CONTENT="Joe Bloggs"> | The author's name. |
| cache-control | <META HTTP-EQUIV="CACHE-CONTROL" CONTENT="NO-CACHE"> | HTTP 1.1. Allowed values = PUBLIC | PRIVATE | NO-CACHE | NO-STORE. Public - may be cached in public shared caches Private - may only be cached in private cache no-Cache - may not be cached no-Store - may be cached but not archived The directive CACHE-CONTROL:NO-CACHE indicates cached information should not be used and instead requests should be forwarded to the origin server. This directive has the same semantics as the PRAGMA:NO-CACHE Clients SHOULD include both PRAGMA:NO-CACHE and CACHE-CONTROL:NO-CACHE when a no-cache request is sent to a server not known to be HTTP/1.1 compliant. Also see EXPIRES. Note: It may be better to specify cache commands in HTTP than in META statements, where they can influence more than the browser, but proxies and other intermediaries that may cache information. |
| Content-Language | <META HTTP-EQUIV="CONTENT-LANGUAGE" CONTENT="en-UK"> |
Declares the primary natural language(s) of the document. May be used by search engines to categorize by language. |
| CONTENT-TYPE | <META HTTP-EQUIV="CONTENT-TYPE" CONTENT="text/html; charset=UTF-8"> |
The HTTP content type may be extended to give the character set. It is recommended to always use this tag and to specify the charset. |
| Copyright | <META NAME="COPYRIGHT" CONTENT="© 2004 Joe Bloggs"> | A copyright statement. |
| DESCRIPTION | <META NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="...summary of web page..."> |
The text can be used when printing a summary of the document. The text should not contain any formatting information. Used by some search engines to describe your document. Particularly important if your document has very little text, is a frameset, or has extensive scripts at the top. |
| EXPIRES | <META HTTP-EQUIV="EXPIRES" CONTENT="Mon, 22 Jul 2002 11:12:01 GMT"> |
The date and time after which the
document should be considered expired. An illegal EXPIRES date, e.g. "0",
is interpreted as "now". Setting EXPIRES to 0 may thus be used to force a
modification check at each visit. Web robots may delete expired documents from a search engine, or schedule a revisit. HTTP 1.1 (RFC 2068) specifies that all HTTP date/time stamps MUST be generated in Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) and in RFC 1123 format. RFC 1123 format = wkday "," SP date SP time SP "GMT" wkday = (Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu, Fri, Sat, Sun) date = 2DIGIT SP month SP 4DIGIT ; day month year (e.g., 02 Jun 1982) time = 2DIGIT ":" 2DIGIT ":" 2DIGIT ; 00:00:00 - 23:59:59 month = (Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec) |
| Keywords | <META NAME="KEYWORDS" CONTENT="Travel, Photographs, Holidays"> |
The keywords are used by some search engines to index your document in addition to words from the title and document body. Typically used for synonyms and alternates of title words. Consider adding frequent misspellings. e.g. heirarchy, hierarchy. |
| PRAGMA NO-CACHE | <META HTTP-EQUIV="PRAGMA" CONTENT="NO-CACHE"> | This directive indicates cached
information should not be used and instead requests should be forwarded to
the origin server. This directive has the same semantics as the
CACHE-CONTROL:NO-CACHE
directive and is provided for backwards compatibility with HTTP/1.0. Clients SHOULD include both PRAGMA:NO-CACHE and CACHE-CONTROL:NO-CACHE when a no-cache request is sent to a server not known to be HTTP/1.1 compliant. HTTP/1.1 clients SHOULD NOT send the PRAGMA request-header. HTTP/1.1 caches SHOULD treat "PRAGMA:NO-CACHE" as if the client had sent "CACHE-CONTROL:NO-CACHE". Also see EXPIRES |
| Refresh | <META HTTP-EQUIV="REFRESH" CONTENT="15;URL=http://www.Other.com/index.html"> |
Specifies a delay in seconds before the browser automatically reloads the document. Optionally, specifies an alternative URL to load, making this command useful for redirecting browsers to other pages. |
| ROBOTS | <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="ALL"> <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="INDEX,NOFOLLOW"> <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX,FOLLOW"> <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NONE"> |
CONTENT="ALL |
NONE | NOINDEX | INDEX| NOFOLLOW | FOLLOW| NOARCHIVE" default = empty = "ALL" "NONE" = "NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW" The CONTENT field is a comma separated list: INDEX search engine robots should include this page. FOLLOW: robots should follow links from this page to other pages. NOINDEX: links can be explored, although the page is not indexed. NOFOLLOW: the page can be indexed, but no links are explored. NONE robots can ignore the page. NOARCHIVE: Google uses this to prevent archiving of the page. See http://www.google.com/bot.html |
| GOOGLEBOT | <META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOARCHIVE"> | In addition to the ROBOTS META Command above,
Google supports a GOOGLEBOT command. With it, you can tell Google that you
do not want the page archived, but allow other search engines to do so. If
you specify this command, Google will not save the page and the page will
be unavailable via its cache. See Google's FAQ |
| Hyperlink titles may have been abbreviated, (right click on the link and select properties for the full URL) |
 A double mouse click anywhere on the page will take you back to the top (except when over hyperlinks) |
Last Updated04/03/2008 - Meta Tag Tips - Reference - Web Development - Neils Resource Web