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| a chart to describe the search engine market (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
The META tag was
created as a sort of "catch-all." These tags allow Webmasters to
issue an unlimited variety of commands, or to provide information to a browser,
search engine, or automated program (i.e., robot).
Search Engines and
Meta elements
Search Engines help people find web sites
Usually they catalog sites by following links from page to
page and saving identification and classification information for each page.
Included Where?
Meta tags are contained in the HEAD section near the top of
the page.
If not placed in this section they will not be read by the
search engines.
The Meta element….
Search engines catalog pages by reading content in each
page’s meta elements, which specifies information about a document.
Two important attributes:
name = identifies type of meta element
content = the information search engines use to catalog
pages
Example of the meta
Element - Keyword
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| Architecture of a Web crawler. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
The “keywords” element provides the search engines a list of
words that describe a page. These words are compared with words in a search
request. How good are you at picking key words users will use to search?
Including meta elements and their content information can
draw viewers to your site.
Remember…
Although you can list as many keywords as you like, most
search engines will not read more than about 1000 characters.
Include your most important keywords at the start of the
tag.
Don’t forget…
They're not displayed to the end user unless you view the
source code of the page.
The meta keyword tag is designed to tell the search engine
what keywords are important to your page, and thereby how people should be able
to find you when they search.
Example of Meta Element - Description
<meta name = “description” content = “RedCareers is a
Guide to Next Gen Career Options In India, to Admission, to Higher Education,
to Competitive Tests, to Jobs Search Government And Private; Offer Free
Resources Like Study Material Free Power Points Download, Previous Years Board
Papers (CBSE), Engineering Entrances, Competitive Test.” />
The content of this type of meta element provides a three to
four line description of the page, written in sentence form. Just a short
summary.
Search Engines also use this description to catalog your
site and sometimes display this information as part of the search results.
Page Generator
This is not necessary but lists the program you used to
write your pages.
<meta name=“generator” content=“Notepad”>
Author and Copyright
Not necessary but an example:
<meta name=“author” content=“parv malik”>
<meta name=“copyright” content=“parv malik 2012”>
Refresh
Using this tag you can have your page automatically refresh
itself to the most current version or change another page entirely after a set
number of seconds (called ‘client pull’)
Useful if you’ve moved a page to a new url and want any
visitors to the old address to quietly sent to a new location.
<meta http-equiv=“refresh” content=5;
url=newurl.html”>
(5 = the number of seconds to wait before changing to a new
page)
Meta expires command…
Gives the users’ browsers a date, after which the page is
deleted from the browsers cache, and must be downloaded again.
This is useful if you want to make sure your visitors are
reading the most current version of a page.
<meta name=“expires” content=“13 March 2013”>
Robots
You can tell engines which ones are welcome and which can
get lost. The following code allows all crawlers in. (you will have to do some
research to find the name of the search engine’s ‘bot’ if you wanted it excluded)
<meta name=“robots” content=“all”>
Should I put meta
tags on every page, or just meta tags on the home or index page?
Put them on every page that you create and publish. The
search engines will find all your pages and if you want to stand a good chance
of them ranking your pages highly, you'll want to put the meta tag element on
each of them
Example:
<head>
<title> My
Web Page</title>
<meta
name=“description” content=“Everything
you wanted to know about career.”>
<meta
name=“keywords” content=“career option,
motivational, free resources.”>
<meta
name=“generator” content=“Notepad”>
<meta
name=“author” content=“ parv malik”>
<meta
name=“copyright” content=“ parv malik 2012”>
</head>
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