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M e t a T a g s
Tutorials: • Webmasters tips • Meta Tags • CSS • Choosing the right Hosting •
• HTML colors Palette • MySQL database •
Every one talks about the importance of Meta Tags, every award program demands a correct use of them, but if you are a beginner webmaster you might not even know what does it mean. Here is a short guide that will show you how to use the basic Meta Tags in your website. First of all, they should be present on all the pages, and the keywords vary from page to page, depending on the written content. Secondly, don't forget that meta tags always go to the <head> of the page. Should you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me for more info.
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content=" text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"> This line indicates what type of HTML document encoding, which is important for proper HTML validation and correct reading of your page by search engine bots.
<META NAME="rating" CONTENT="General"> This line indicates the rating of your website, i.e. general audience or adult only.
<META NAME="robots" CONTENT=" index,follow">
This line tells the SE to index your pages and to crawl them in the future. you may also choose not to index the pages at the moment ("noindex, follow") or to index them once and not to come back by placing "index, nofollow".
<META NAME="revisit-after" CONTENT=" 7 days"> This tells the Google's bot after how long should the site be crawled again. The advantage of crawling sooner is that your website will get updated in the SE more often. However, you should always bear in mind that crawling your website by a bot consumes bandwidth, and if you are limited with your bandwidth (we all are, but I mean running low) you might consider setting the bot on 14 or 30 days revisit. Always remember that it is a matter of priorities.
<META NAME = "country" CONTENT= "USA"> This line of meta tags is necessary if you want to indicate what country you, and your site, belongs to. Instead of "USA", if applicable, fill in your home land.
<META NAME="objecttype" CONTENT="Type of your website's activity, in a few words here"> Here you briefly say what the site is about, this line, in most cases, remains the same throughout the site.
<META NAME="distribution" CONTENT="Global"> If you wish to pull traffic from anywhere on the planet to your website, you should make your distribution "global". However, if the aim of your site is to, let's say, promote a local club, and therefore is only needs to pull potential customers to your site from the region - you may replace your distribution preferences with "local". Please note that there is no damage in distributing your website globally, while running and promoting a local club. The damage however, only occurs when you need a world wide traffic and put "local" on your meta tags.
<META NAME="copyright" CONTENT="Copyright © 2006 - Your name"> If the website is a fruit of your hard work, put your name and year here. The name should be of the person who is responsible for published content.
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<META NAME="description" CONTENT="Brief description of your website with relevant keywords of the page"> The description of your website is very important, because due to increase in spam websites, that spam with they keywords, SE tend to concentrate more on the description of your page. This is why it's very important to optimize your description, so that it won't exceed 200 characters, yet will include as many keywords (which appear the most on your page) as possible.
<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT=" keyword 1, keyword 2"> We do not recommend to place more than 20 words. Too many words, as well as same words that appears above 5 times in your keywords list - may result banning you from the search engines. Remember, for best result, include keywords or phrases, that appear at least 2 times on the web page.
<META NAME="author" CONTENT=" Author's first and last name here"> Every author of the website deserves his credit. In this line of the meta tags you include the webmaster's name. In some cases, however, you place the name of the website's owner here.
<META HTTP -equiv="pragma" content="no-cache"> This will prevent pages from pages been cached by the search engines. The good side of it is that your visitors will see the site's updates and will not view the cached old version, which might not be up-to-date anymore. The down side of it is the additional usage of bandwidth. Your website will waste bandwidth every time it gets crawled (unlike cached pages that actually saves you a bit bandwidth).
You may choose not to include this line at all then.
<META NAME="language" content="en"> Write 'en' if your website is written in English and you wish to distribute it globally, to the wide English speaking community.
However, if your site is written in Dutch, write "nl", if in French -- write "fr", if in Russian -- "ru", etc.
<META HTTP -equiv="imagetoolbar" content=" no"> Have you seen, in Internet Explorer, when you roll the mouse over a large image - it generates a little box with options to save, print,
etc? In order to prevent this small bar from appearing (which doesn't look good over a header, for example), add this line in your meta tags.
<META HTTP-EQUIV="window-target" CONTENT=" _top"> This indicates where will your new window open. To ensure it goes to the top of the page, add this line.
Like I said, these are the very basic meta tags, which will make your site "bot friendly" and show the evaluators that your have made "a good use" of them.
After you finished adding them to your site, analyze every page for keywords relevancy with Submit Express.
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