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A meta
tag is a head element that records information
about the current page, such as the character
encoding, author, copyright, or keywords. These
tags can also be used to give information to the
server, such as the expiration date, refresh interval,
and rating for the page.
Placement
of META tags
META tags should always be placed in the head
of the HTML document between the actual <HEAD>
tags, before the BODY tag. This is very important
with framed pages, as a lot of developers tend
to forget to include them on individual framed
pages. Remember, if you only use META tags on
the frameset pages, you'll be missing a large
number of potential hits.
Attribute
specifies whether the meta tag contains descriptive
information about the page (name) or HTTP header
information (http-equiv).
Value
specifies the type of information you're supplying
in this tag. Some values, such as description,
keywords, and refresh, are already well defined
(and have their own individual Property inspectors
in Dreamweaver), but you can specify practically
any value (for example, creation date, document
ID, or level).
Content
is the actual information.
Determining
the popularity of your keywords
Overture provides a free service to determine
the best keywords to use for your product or service
just select the "Search Term Suggestion Tool"
option from this link: Overture
Keyword
Attribute
Chances are that if you manually code your Web
pages, you’re aware of the "keyword"
and "description" attributes. These
allow the search engines to easily index your
page using the keywords you specifically tell
it, along with a description of the site that
you yourself get to write. Couldn't be simpler,
right? You use the keywords attribute to tell
the search engines which keywords to use, like
this:
<META
NAME ="keywords" CONTENT="life,
universe, mankind, plants, relationships, the
meaning of life, science">
You
cannot spike the keywords by using the same word
repeated over and over, most search engines have
refined their spiders to ignore such tricks.
Description
Attribute
Using the META description attribute, you add
your own description for your page:
<META
NAME="description" CONTENT="This
page is about the meaning of life, the universe,
mankind and plants.">
Make sure that you use
several of your keywords in your description.
While you are at it, you may want to include the
same description enclosed in comment tags, just
for the spiders that do not look at META tags.
To do that, just use the regular comment tags,
like this:
<!--//
This page is about the meaning of life, the universe,
mankind and plants. //--!>Back
to top
Summary
Attribute
Using the name attribute "SUMMARY"
informs the user agent that you are going to give
a brief summary of the page content.
<META
NAME="summary" CONTENT="This page
has everything you need to know about the meaning
of life.">
Refresh
This tag specifies the time in seconds before
the Web browser reloads the document automatically.
Alternatively, it can specify a different URL
for the browser to load.
<META
HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" CONTENT="0;URL=http://www.newurl.com">
Back to top
Be
sure to remember to place quotation marks around
the entire CONTENT attribute’s value, or
the page will not reload at all.
ROBOTs
On the other hand, there are probably some of
you who do not wish your pages to be indexed by
the spiders at all. Worse yet, you may not have
access to the robots.txt file. The robots META
attribute was designed with this problem in mind.
<META
NAME="robots" CONTENT="all | none
| index | noindex | follow | nofollow">
The
default for the robot attribute is "all".
This would allow all of the files to be indexed.
"None" would tell the spider not to
index any files, and not to follow the hyperlinks
on the page to other pages. "Index"
indicates that this page may be indexed by the
spider, while "follow" would mean that
the spider is free to follow the links from this
page to other pages. The inverse is also true,
thus this META tag:
<META
NAME="robots" CONTENT=" noindex">
Back
to top
This
would tell the spider not to index this page,
but would allow it to follow subsidiary links
and index those pages. "nofollow" would
allow the page itself to be indexed, but the links
could not be followed. As you can see, the robots
attribute can be very useful for Web developers.
For more information about the robot attribute,
visit the W3C’s robot paper.
Automatically
Generate META Tags!
Want to generate your META tags automatically?
Click the link below then fill in the fields.
http://vancouver-webpages.com/META/mk-metas.html
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