This tutorial describes the common meta tags you should
place in each of your HTML documents.
Meta-Tags go inside the <HEAD> and </HEAD> tags
of your HTML document.
Title (Strongly
Recommended) Format: <TITLE>Your title
here</TITLE>
Your
documents title will appear in user's hotlists, the banner of
most browsers, and robot-generated lists. It should be a
concise, one-line summary of what the page is about. Bear in
mind that users may not reach your document through your
homepage, but directly using a search engine or link at
another site, so the title should ideally be self-sufficient.
If this is a company web site, try to include the name of your
company here also. Instead of Tools and Supplies, make it Joes
Hardware - Tools and Supplies.
Keywords (Strongly
Recommended) Format: <META NAME="KEYWORDS"
CONTENT="separate, keywords, with,
commas"> Comma-separated
list of key words for indexing your document. Some robots
look at keywords in context, so it is best to preserve word
order and case, e.g. pizza, Vancouver, British Columbia rather
than british vancouver columbia pizza. Try to use plurals for
your keywords, search engines will process both singular and
plural form. DO NOT REPEAT KEYWORDS!
Description (Strongly
Recommended) Format: <META NAME="DESCRIPTION"
CONTENT="A description of your
page"> The description
is presented to the user along with the document's title as
the result of a search. Many robots use the first few lines
of text as a description if the Description tag is not
present. For documents using frames, it is possible that there
is no such text present. Try to include your company name or
web site name here also. Use keywords in your description. Try
to avoid superlatives (such as "best", "biggest",
"coolest").
Author
(Recommended) Format: <META NAME="AUTHOR"
CONTENT="Your Name">
This tag names the author or creator of the
page. This is useful if a searcher would like to find more
pages created by you.
Redirect Format: <META HTTP-EQUIV="refresh"
CONTENT="XX;
url=http://www.yourname.com/"> This tag will let you redirect your visitors to
another URL after a specified amount of time. This is useful
if your site changes URLs. Replace
XX with the number of
seconds to wait before redirecting.
The filler is a comma separated list of
terms: ALL, NONE, INDEX, NOINDEX, FOLLOW,
NOFOLLOW.
Discussion: This tag is meant to
provide users who cannot control the robots.txt file at their
sites. It provides a last chance to keep their content out of
search services. It was decided not to add syntax to allow
robot specific permissions within the meta-tag.
INDEX means that robots are welcome to
include this page in search services. FOLLOW means that
robots are welcome to follow links from this page to find
other pages.
So a value of "NOINDEX" allows the
subsidiary links to be explored, even though the page is not
indexed. A value of "NOFOLLOW" allows the page to be indexed,
but no links from the page are explored (this may be useful if
the page is a free entry point into pay-per-view content, for
example. A value of "NONE" tells the robot to ignore the
page.
