What Are Meta Tags And What Do They Do ? What are some....

KyoNiwa · September 25, 2004

What are all the meta tags and what exactally do they do?

Edited August 10, 2005 by microscopic^earthling (see edit history)

jcguy · September 27, 2004

There are a lot of meta tags with many uses, but the main meta tags serve to display the keywords and description of the page. There's a discussion here about the use of meta tags to control spiders access to your pages, check it out.

Hercco · September 28, 2004

Meta-tags contains meta information. And meta information means information about information. For example typical meta tags are author and document languge

alizasa · October 12, 2004

neno.tu · October 22, 2004

Meta-tags are special HTML tags that are no displayed o the browser but contains information about the website and some commands for external users...Contains info about:- Author- Copyright- Description- Keywords- Robots commands (like for google's spiders)- Displaying commands (like disabling the IE imagetoolbar)- Redirection info (URL redirection or Refresh)- Content (charset, etc...)- Country- Language- etc...If you use every meta-tag you can setup a very customized site and easy to index by the Search engines...

ashiezai1405241473 · November 27, 2004

the are quite a few of meta tag like

- Author- Copyright
- Description
- Keywords
- Robots commands (like for google's spiders)
- Displaying commands (like disabling the IE imagetoolbar)
- Redirection info (URL redirection or Refresh)
- Content (charset, etc...)
- Country
- Language
- etc...

but most of them doesnt mean anything to the search engine, like country language copyright.. etc.
but the most important thing is : SE usually dun care about keywords but ppl always think that if i put "xxx" in the keyword metatag then my page could be searched by the term "xxx"

chilipie · November 27, 2004

These are the meta tags I usually use:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="application/xhtml+xml; charset=iso-8859-1" /><meta name="Description"  content="Haze8 - Standards compliant web design." /><meta name="Keywords" content="Haze8, Haze, 8, web, design, compliant" /><meta name="Author" content="Ollie Craig" /><meta name="Copyright" content="2004, Haze8" /><meta name="Revised" content="21/11/04" /><meta name="Expires" content="never" />

Most SEs don't bother with keywords anymore, mainly because too many people just stuff their pages full of unrelated words. Now they tend to look for information in the actual content of you page (the stuff between the <body> and </body> tags). The best way to get your page ranked high in a SE is to sprinkle the text with keywords - not too many though, or the SE might think you are trying to spam it.

rodneylay · August 10, 2005

What are all the meta tags and what exactally do they do?

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Without meta tags in your web pages you will limit your ability to be ranked well on the search engines. While they are not as effective as they once were, they are still important aspects of coding a good web site. There are a lot of other purposes for including meta tags beyond the search engines and I will describe the types of meta tags and their purpose below. Learn how to use these if you want a truely professional web site.

META Tags are HTML tags which provide information that describes the content of the webpages a user will be viewing. Search engines have recognized that website owners and administrators can use this resource to control their positioning and descriptions in search engine results. Many search engines have now incorporated reading META tags as part of their indexing formulas.

Abstract META Tag

The Abstract META tag is very similar to the description Meta tag, except its an abstraction or a brief summary of the description META tag. Generally the Abstract META tag is a one line sentence which gives an overview of the entire webpage. Although search engines do not as often use this tag, it is a useful complement to search engines that read the first few lines of text of your webpages.

<META name="Abstract" content="Abstract phrase">

Author META Tag

The author META tag defines the name of the author of the document being read. This tag is not widely supported but is recognized as part of the META Tag standard. Supported data formats include the name, email address of the webmaster, company name or Internet address (URL). The most common format is to insert the name of the person or organization and a contact email address.

<META name="Author" content="Author Information">

Copyright META Tag

The copyright META tag defines any copyright statements you wish to disclose about your webpage documents. You may wish to indicate any trademark names, patent numbers, copyright or other information which you want to publicly disclose as your intellectual property.

<META name="Copyright" content="Copyright Statement">

Description META Tags

Search engines that support META tags will often display the Description META tag along with your title in their results. Search engines will often capture the entire META tag of your description field, but webmasters should bear in mind that when a search engine displays the results to a user, the space is limited, usually under 20 words which you can use to grab the attention of a user. For this reason, when creating your META tags, webmasters should make the first sentence of their description field to capture the attention of a user and use the rest of the description tag to elaborate further.

<META name="Description" content="Your description">

Distribution META Tag

The distribution META tag defines the level or degree of distribution of your webpage and how it should be classified in relation to methods of distribution on the world wide web. There are currently only three forms of distribution supported by the distribution tag: Global (indicates that your webpage is intended for mass distribution to everyone), Local (intended for local distribution of your document), and IU - Internal Use (not intended for public distribution).

<META name="Distribution" content="Global">

Expires META Tag

The Expires META tag defines the expiration date and time of the document being indexed. If your website is running a limited time event or there is a preset date when your document will no longer be valid, you should include the Expires tag to indicate to search engines when to delete your webpage from their database.

The expires tag is commonly used in conjunction with the Revisit Tag as a means to get search engines to re-visit a website every few days. This is commonly used by websites who update their content frequently and want search engines to have a fresh copy of their content.

<META name="Expires" content="Tue, 01 Jun 1999 19:58:02 GMT">

Keyword META Tag

Search engines that support META tags will often use the keywords found on your pages as a means to categorize your website based on the search engines indexing algorithms (proprietary algorithms which index your website in search engine databases). Ensure you choose keywords that are relevant to your site and avoid excessive repetition as many search engines will penalize your rankings for attempting to abuse their system. Similar to the Description META Tag, search engines give priority to the first few words in your description, so focus on your main keywords and then elaborate further by using synonyms or other related words. When creating keywords for your website, do not infringe on other companies trademarks or copyrights. Many companies have filed and won lawsuits for attempting to "hijack" traffic to competitors from search engines.

<META name="Keywords" content="first, second, third">

Language META Tag

The Language META tag declares to users the natural language of the document being indexed. Search engines which index websites based on language often read this tag to determine which language(s) is supported. This tag is particularly useful for non-english and multiple language websites. I won't try to list the abbreviations for various languages to include in the tag, but use the link below to see a complete list of languages and the codes for each.

http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/IG/ert/iso639.htm

<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Language" content="EN">

Refresh META Tag

The refresh META tag is used as a way to redirect or refresh users to another webpage after a number of seconds. This META tag is often used as a "bridge" page which is accessed first by users and are then redirected to another webpage. Some search engines discourage this type of META tag because it opens opportunity for users to spam search engines with similar pages which all lead to the same page. In addition, this also makes many of the search engines databases cluttered with irrelevant and multiple versions of the same data.

<METAHTTP-EQUIV="Refresh"content="X;

URL=http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/;

X indicates delay in seconds URL indicates the URL to redirect to

Revisit META Tag

The Revisit META tag defines how often a search engine or spider should come to your website for re-indexing. Often this tag is used for websites that change their content often and on a regular basis. This tag can also be beneficial in boosting your rankings if search engines display results based on the most recent submissions.

<META name="Revisit-After" content="X Days">

X indicates a number

Robots META Tag

Robots, also known as spiders, are automated mechanisms that spider your site, or search your site on how to categorize the information you submitted to the search engine. Typically, a website owner would submit the main page and the robots would visit your site and collect all subpages and related links from your main page. However, this tag enables you to control which pages you would like spidered, and which to ignore. For instance, certain webpages and directories (ie: CGI Scripts) you may not want indexed in the search engines. Using the robots tag, you can define which pages to follow, which to index and which to ignore completely. Supported types are as follows ... noindex, index, nofollow, and follow.

<META name="Robots" content="index,follow">

There is a ton of information on the internet about this subject. Just go to Google and type is Meta Tags in the search box. Hope this helps!

Rodney Lay

calixt · August 10, 2005

I believe that meanwhile all major search engines know how to deal with page ranking "tricks" using metatags.

But I need them, anyway.

Here are some examples:

1. Special chars

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">

Be sure to put the charset-metatag first, if you do not use entities for special chars (like Ä in German). First also means: before the <title>-Tag

2. Metatags in PHP

<meta name="description" content="Text to be displayed when page is shown in search engine result.">

When I "discovered" server side scripting and started coding with PHP I at first included the same description-metatag in each file, regardless of the contents.

Thus, I got poor SE results - nobody could obtain useful information on pages like "mydomain.tld/index.php?module=1" and "mydomain.tld/index.php?module=2" and so on. It became much better when I included specific description-metatags for each file.

3. Redirection

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; URL=http://mydomain.tld/index.php?param=something">

When switching to PHP, I had to deal with the fact that all my former html pages (which now became obsolete) were still listed in SE results. So I kept them but redirected any request for them via the refresher metatag. (Later I learned how to use a 404-Error handler instead but I still use this metatag sometimes.)

4. Prevent Caching

<meta http-equiv="pragma" content="no-cache"><meta http-equiv="expires" content="0"><meta http-equiv="cache-control" content="no-cache">

For some pages I had to ensure that they were loaded anew everytime when requested. These three metatags should cover any proxy and/or browser.

Have a nice day

calixt

ASR1405241491 · August 10, 2005

im sure someone already gave you all the information about meta-tags, but here is my two cents on it.... hopefully it covers many stuff other people have not gone through in this thread...A meta tag description is as follows...<meta name="DESCRIPTION" content="The text you want goes here."> These are the words that will appear in the text of the listing of most [not all] search engines when you do a search... Use interesting words because this is what your reader will see...Consider the following - which one would you click on if your were looking for a holiday home? 1. Nice holiday home... 2. Happy holidays! Breathtaking Ocean view with beautiful garden and outdoor entertainment area...Make the description interesting and relevant... No point in telling your would be visitor you have a sea view when you sell trucks! Meta KeywordS:This tag look like this:<meta name="KEYWORDS" content="happy holidays tranquil surroundings peaceful accommodation holiday home">Some rules for META DESCRIPTION tags: 1. You should not go more than about 500 characters or some search Engines will ignore them or worse still, penalize you for spamming... 2. Do not repeat keywords more than three times or you will be penalized. 3. Most advise you should separate the keywords with commas.... Personally the writer has found that leaving the commas out works better... 4. Make sure your keywords are relevant to your pages' content... TITLEBy far the most important tag is the TITLE... This is the heading people will see in the Search Engines and is what will make them click on your link or not... Be sure to make your Title as interesting and eye catching as possible...The format for the TITLE tag is like so:<title>Secrets of META TAGS explained.</title> CUSTOMIZE YOUR META TAGSYour meta tags on every page of your website should be different... Sure, this is a lot of work but it is essential. You should spend as much time and effort thinking of what your visitors are likely to be typing into the search box at the search engines as what you spend on designi.ng your pages...We did an experiment on on of our large websites about a year ago... This is what we did: * We made two identical pages (images and text), * We put invisible links (made the links the same color as the background) from the main page to both pages so the search engines would find them, * On the one page we carefully selected out META TAGS, on the other we did not.The result? * The page with the 'untweaked' META TAGS got 128 hits after 6 months. * The page with the carefully selected TAGS got 56,295 hits in the same period!OTHER META TAGSTitleThe title of the web page is perhaps the most important of all meta tags<title>Laugh until you cry</title>Keywords<meta name="keywords" content="free, food, recipes, lala, blah blah">Description<meta name="description" content="If you want to laugh till you cry, Click here. This stuff is really funny!">The page description should be less than 100 wordsAuthorThe name of the person who authored the page<meta name="author" content="asr">EmailThe contact person's e-mail address. Don't put this in unless you want SPAM!<link rev="made" href="nospam@mydomain.com">CopyrightThe copyright year and the name<meta name="copyright" content="2002 by asr">RevisitHow often to tell the spiders to come back<meta name="revisit-after" content="14 days">RefreshThis field must contain a URL that refers the page to another link in a specified number of seconds<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="120; url=http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ date when the content expires<meta http-equiv="expires" content="Wed, 39 Jan 2004 26:29:02 GMT">DistributionGlobal – Used for major entry pointsLocal – Used for local entry points<meta name="distribution" content="global">RobotWeb spiders can be restricted using the following Robot meta tags. Recommend you do not use these but your a robots.txt file instead.:All – Robots may traverse and index the pageNo Index – Robots may traverse but not index the pageNo Follow – Robots may index the page but not follow itNone – Robots may neither index nor traverse the page<meta name="robots" content="nofollow">RatingGeneral14 YearsMatureRestricted<meta name="rating" content="14 years">Character setThe most common character set is ISO-8859-1 The following is a rough list of the languages contained in the ISO 8859 seriesISO-8859-1 – Western Europe and Americas: Afrikaans, Basque, Catalan, Danish, Dutch, English, Faeroese, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Icelandic, Irish, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish and SwedishISO-8859-2 – Latin-written Slavic and Central European languagesISO-8859-3 – Esperanto, Galician, Maltese, and TurkishISO-8859-4 – Scandinavia/BalticISO-8859-5 – CyrillicISO-8859-6 – ArabicISO-8859-7 – Modern GreekISO-8859-8 – HebrewISO-8859-9 – Western Europe and Americas: Afrikaans, Basque, Catalan, Danish, Dutch, English, Faeroese, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Turkish, Irish, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish and SwedishUTF-8 - Unicode<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1">LanguageChoose a language or add another under Other in Front Page (or whatever you use)<meta http-equiv="content-language" content="en-us">Page cachingBrowsers cache pages by default Select the No-Cache option to stop caching of your page<meta http-equiv="pragma" content="no-cache">GeneratorThe name of the program used to create your web page<meta name="generator" content="Home brew 1.0.0">Window TargetUseful for preventing page framing<meta http-equiv="window-target" content="_top">AbstractA brief summary of the description meta tag, under 100 words<meta name="abstract" content="Viewpoints, Tools, and Content for Webmasters">CommentsComments are not actually meta tags Some search engines have used them instead of meta tags You may also want to add a comment as a self note.Chin chin...

ASR1405241491 · August 10, 2005

Also, if you like to just have an automated meta tag for you.. just try to visit this website...

If you do not want to go into the nitty gritty of it all and manually do it... you could just go ahead and use this website.... But obviously you will be limited on what you could actually do... so jjust keep that in mind...

http://www.doth.com/metatag.htm

Chin chin...

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