<meta
tags>
The most widely used meta tags your HTML documents
will need. With explanations.
There is a lot of misinformation on meta tags,
their usage, and exactly what effect if any they have on the traffic
of your web site all over the Internet.
We are not experts, and will never claim to be.
What we have learned has worked for this web site and hundreds
of others our company has been involved in over the years. Realistically
meta tags do indeed work, but there is more to their creation
and usage than thinking up a bunch of keywords that you want your
web site to be found for by others and embedding them into your
web pages. We hope we can enlighten you to some of the ways to
use meta data in your web pages and help you in getting traffic
for your site.
The first problem with using meta tags is that
a lot of people do not know that there must be a relevance between
the keywords you are using and the content of the page you are
using those keywords on. They must be in the body of the page
you are working on several times for them to be effective. Your
targeted words must also be in your page title and in your page
description.
You need to think of what words people would
use to search for your site, and create web pages using those
words in the body, in the title, in the description.
You need to use keywords that are relevant to
what your site is about, take your time in the selection of these
words, sit down away from your HTML editor, or whatever you use
to create web pages, and start writing your content for your web
pages, use a good text editor, the reason for using a text editor
is that text editors can make it easier to copy and paste the
text into you HTML documents with out adding unnecessary characters
that you will have to clean up later. Make sure your keywords
are used throughout the text (this is where it gets hard) and
make sure the text makes sense to you, and hopefully to the other
people that will read it. Use a thesaurus if needed. (a good text
editor is NoteTab (http://www.notetab.com/) the freeware version
has many features that will help in creating your meta tags, HTML,
ASP and other documents.)
The greatest misconception!
A lot of people think that by just adding the keywords tag and
placing the keywords in their pages they would likely be found
by just having the keyword meta tag and it will give them unlimited
traffic, this is not always true! That meta tags are the web site
cure all for traffic woes, also not true.
Your keywords have to have a direct reflection
on the content contained in the body of your web page that is
the very first priority, its also very helpful to have your targeted
words in your title, and in your page description. One other thing.
There must be 999 gazillion words on web pages throughout the
World Wide Web, with that many words in documents indexed in search
engines and directories, single keywords may not help you at all,
that is why 2 and 3 word phrases should be used. When people use
search engines they usually use multiple words phrases. There
is also a practice of using common spelling mistakes of keywords
also, we have never used that style so we cannot tell you how
effective it is.
Most search engine bots only spider so many characters
of a page, the average is 1000, some engines read the whole page,
others just the title, and some the end of the page. Some engines
do not even use meta data values. Directories do not even spider
your pages but never let any of this get you down. Content is
usually the way to go with getting traffic, and right now it works,
in few months all of this may change.
This is just the beginning there are more ups
and downs for your web site ahead, anyone with a popular web site
and not paying thousands of dollars has had to work hard at it,
you will have to work hard at it. We have had to deal with search
engines changing the way they rank web pages. We have had to redo
our web pages, re submit them, re write them, and we do it every
chance we get because without traffic your web site will have
a very small life expectancy, but if you want the traffic you
will work at it.
When your site is taken down in rank, that is
hard, especially if you had a good listing, it will happen, it
has happened to all of us at one time or another.
But, you must not give up if you want the traffic.
You start over, you re-optimize your pages and resubmit them,
and keep checking to see if you got listed, what rank is it at
for your search term. Over and over its never ending if you want
your site to stay popular.
You know, sometimes maybe it would be better
to pay for the traffic.
The Meta Tag Elements
TITLE
Is placed at the top of your <head> </head>
tags in your HTML document. Note: FrontPage users - when FP saves
a document it places the title where it wants to in the document.
The middle or the bottom of the head tags, remember to manually
move the title of your web page to the uppermost top. And never
use more than 80 characters in your title.
<head>
<title>The Name Of Your Page</title>
</head>
PICS
The next is called the PICS tag or label - it
is not a necessity but it does help in showing spiders and web
browsers your child safe rating for your site. You get your coding
from safe surf or R.S.A.C. one tag for each rating resource. More
information can be attained here http://www.w3.org/pics.
<meta http-equiv="PICS-Label" content=''
">
GENERATOR
This tag tells what web publishing tool (program)
you used to create the web page it is not a necessary tag element
so you do not have to use it, but, most web creation programs
will use it for you anyway.
<meta name="generator" content="">
S-Bots
This meta tag should be used always, as it instructs
the robot (spider) what to do with your pages.
<meta name="robot" content="">
ALL - index all pages (some engines do have a limit on how many
pages can be indexed per site) and follow.
INDEX - Index the specific page but do not follow the links.
FOLLOW - The search engine robots will follow and index linked
pages.
NOINDEX - Continue onto linked pages but do not index current
page.
NOFOLLOW - Do not follow the associated linked documents.
DISTRIBUTION
This meta tag designates the scope of distribution
of your document. This can be used for content control. Web servers
will not service a Local document to web visitors.
<meta name="distribution" content="">
GLOBAL
LOCAL
COPYRIGHT
This meta tag clearly states in a manner acceptable
by prevailing laws, who owns the copyright of the document text,
or design.
<meta name="copyright" content="date
| your name or name of company">
AUTHOR
The author meta tag, the author of the web site.
<meta name="author" content="">
LANGUAGE
This meta tag identifies the language of the
context. You can edit the tags into any valid language and country
code.
<meta http-equiv="language" content="eng">
<meta http-equiv="dialect" content="us">
Rating
This meta tag is a simple site rating scheme.
Made almost obsolete by PICS.
<meta name="rating" content="">
Safe For Kids
14 Years
General
Mature
Restricted
CLASSIFICATION
This meta tag defines the site classification.
This tag can and will be used to buy some search engines to place
your site in an appropriate category.
<meta name="classification" content="">
DOCUMENT EXPIRES
This meta tag can be used by caches to determine
when to fetch a fresh copy of the associated document.
<meta http-equiv="expires" content="">
REPLY TO
This meta tag is used to identify to whom the
visitor should send comments or replies.
<meta http-equiv="reply-to" content="">
*This tag is not being used as much due to e-mail
harvestors that spider web sites to gather up e-mail addresses
for sending unsolicited e-mail.
REVISIT
This meta tag is used to inform the search bot/web
crawler when it should revisit your web document to update its
index. Recommended NO LESS THAN 30 DAYS and NO MORE than 1 year.
<meta name="revist-after" content="30
days">
PRAGMA
This meta tag is used to inform the browser
that it should retrieve a new copy of the document versus using
a cached version.
<meta http-equiv="pragma" content="no-cache">
KEYWORDS META TAG
This meta tag informs the search bot/web crawler
what the main points are of the document it is reviewing. Never
repeat your keywords more that 6 times as a rule. No more than
1000 characters in your keywords tag.
<meta name="keywords" content="
">
Description Meta Tag
This meta tag informs the search bot/web crawler
or visitor via a brief synopsis what your site is all about. Not
more than 200 characters should be used.
<meta name="description" content="
">
