Meta Tag Optimization Tutorial
There are a number of different Meta tags that you can use, but the most
important ones are the Description and
the Keywords Meta tags as well as having
a title for the web page.
Title
The title of your web page should also be in the document head, which you
want to make as descriptive as possible for the search engines to index.
Description
This tag is used to give a short description of the contents of your web
page, and is often used by search engines in the search results as a description
of what your page contains. However, many search engines will only display the
first 20 characters, so be as short and descriptive as possible.
Keywords
To help get your web site up in the ratings you can supplement the title and
description with a list of keywords, separated by commas, that some one might
type into a search engine when looking for a site like yours. Most search
engines will index the first 64 characters in this Meta tag.
Rating
This is used to give the web page a rating for the appropriateness for kids.
The ratings are, general, mature, restricted, and 14 years.
The rest of the tags are not necessary but you can use them for documentation
purposes.
Author
This is used to identify the author of the web page.
Copyright
This one identifies any copyright information there is for the web page.
Revisit-After
The revisit-after meta tag is useful for sites where the content changes
often and tells the search engine how often to revisit your site. The example
below will tell the search engine to revisit your site ever 31 days.
Expires
This meta tag is used by responsible web masters to let the search engine
know when the page expires and can be removed from the search engines directory.
It can either be set to never, or a date in the format day, month, year, ex. 28
June 2003.
Distribution
Tells the search engine who the page is meant for and can be set to; global,
for everyone, local, for regional sites, and UI, for Internal Use.
Robots
This Meta tag is used is used to tell the search engine whether you want the
web page indexed or not. You only really need to use this Meta tag if you DON'T
wont your web page indexed. The values for this tag are: -
| index(default) |
Index the page |
| noindex |
Don't index the page |
| nofollow |
Don't index any pages hyper-linked to this page |
| none |
Same as "noindex, nofollow" |
Meta Tags Example
Below is an example of the head of a document containing Meta tags for search
engines and a title for the web page:
|
