Meta Tag Basics for the Newbie Webmaster
by Pastaboy
Meta Tags are used to include information pretaining to your html page/site. They are placed between the <head> and </head> tags of your page. Transparent to your sites visitors but visible to search engines and browsers. To learn about the search engines, you need "test", remember to always look under "under the covers" and read everything you can. First and foremost you need to be able to distinguish the "Fact from Fiction" have the time to distinguish "The fresh ideas,from the outdated". What did work "flawlessly" in the beginning,well its outdated. Ideas became predicatable, Just Like a "DFN" webmaster, so people think. There is no panecia for the SE's. Just a little hard work. You need to listen to what your read. No One is Going to feed you. Use your fork to feed yourself, wake up. Like BillPMB said "Have you done your homework, I have." Its always the little things that mean so much!. That have the biggest impact on you as you learn.
Lets get ready to have a Piss with Pasta
Below are the minium basic meta tags you should "always" include on your pages. They will make you "money" when used properly:
Keyword & Description Tags
"Deep Search" engines utilize spiders/robots to gather information about your site for their "search" indexs/databases.The spiders use the words designated by the <title> </title> tag ,the "most" important tag on your page. Meta tags tell people exactly what your site pretains to. So make sure you make your keywords a searchable representaion of your page/title. For example:
"Having a Piss with Pasta" as a page title. The way the keyword and description tag could be engineered is as follows,
<META name="keywords" content=" piss,pasta,have piss,have pasta,pastapiss
">
<META name="description" content="VNWR is the Place to have a Piss with Pasta
">
The Robot Tag
With the robot tag you can give the search engine spider/robot some specfic instructions as to what you want it to do with your page when it returns home after its quest for information.
Either - [INDEX or NOINDEX] and
[FOLLOW or NOFOLLOW]
[INDEX,NOINDEX]
Tells the robot whether you want this page indexed or not.
[FOLLOW,NOFOLLOW]
Tells the robot to either follow the links and index the pages of your site or dont follow the links and dont index my page.
<META name="robots" content="index,follow
">
The "ALT" Tag
The alt-tag is to implement into your image and easy way load up a page on keywords "relevent" to your site
Instead of having this <IMG SRC =
"PastasPissers1.jpg">
This is a better technique:
<IMG SRC = "PastasPissers1.jpg"
ALT="The Women of PastasPissers love to hang out at XXX Sorority Girls">
This will not only help with boosting your pages keyword density. Its another chance to "subliminally suggest" your site to the surfer. Since the image being displayed will show a text box when the surfer "mouses over"your image.
Meta tags worth mentioning
<META name="description" content="Global
">
What this tag basically tells the search engine. When you index my pages within your database make my content available for global distribution
<META name="distribution" content="Mature"
>
What this tag basically tells the search engine. When you index my pages within your database give my content a mature "rating". Just another way to protect yourself.
<META name="Revisit-After" content=" ## days">
What this tag basically tells the search engine. Revisit my site after so many days since I will be adding new links to my pages. Refresh my listing with your index. Replace the ( ##) In the above example with either 15,20,30 days. Dont be a Jackass, and provoke the engines to spider more than once a month.