Metatags and Their Uses

A brief description of each of the basic meta tags followed by an example:

Title

The title of the web page is perhaps the most important of all meta tags

<title>Clickfire - Viewpoints, Tools, and Content for Webmasters</title>

Keywords

Keywords should be separated by commas, with the more important words listed first. Note: Inktomi (acquired by Yahoo!) was said to be the only major search engine that using the keywords meta tag to index sites.

<meta name="keywords" content="free, webmaster, resources, articles, tools, tutorials, reviews, graphics, scripts, download, CIW, freeware">

Description

<meta name="description" content="Clickfire empowers webmasters by offering free resources like graphics, articles, news, reviews, freeware, tutorials, scripts, wallpaper, backgrounds, Metty meta tag maker, icons, CIW web design, and Christian testimony">

The page description should be less than 200 words

Author

This represents the name of the person who authored the page

<meta name="author" content="Emory Rowland">

Email

The contact person's e-mail address

<link rev="made" href="nospam@someaddress.com">

Copyright

The copyright year and the name of holder

<meta name="copyright" content="2002 by Clickfire">

Revisit

This sets the frequency of a spider's return

<meta name="revisit-after" content="2 weeks">

Refresh

This 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://www.clickfire.com">

Expires

The date when the content expires

<meta http-equiv="expires" content="Wed, 30 Jan 2003 21:29:02 GMT">

Distribution

Global – Used for major entry points
Local – Used for local entry points

<meta name="distribution" content="global">

Robot

Web spiders can be restricted using the following Robot meta tags:

All – Robots may traverse and index the page
No Index – Robots may traverse but not index the page
No Follow – Robots may index the page but not follow it
None – Robots may neither index nor traverse the page

<meta name="robots" content="nofollow">

Rating

General
14 Years
Mature
Restricted

<meta name="rating" content="14 years">

Character set

The most common character set is ISO-8859-1 The following is a rough list of the languages contained in the ISO 8859 series

ISO-8859-1 – Western Europe and Americas: Afrikaans, Basque, Catalan, Danish, Dutch, English, Faeroese, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Icelandic, Irish, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish

ISO-8859-2 – Latin-written Slavic and Central European languages

ISO-8859-3 – Esperanto, Galician, Maltese, and Turkish

ISO-8859-4 – Scandinavia/Baltic

ISO-8859-5 – Cyrillic

ISO-8859-6 – Arabic

ISO-8859-7 – Modern Greek

ISO-8859-8 – Hebrew

ISO-8859-9 – Western Europe and Americas: Afrikaans, Basque, Catalan, Danish, Dutch, English, Faeroese, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Turkish, Irish, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish

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

Language

Choose a language or add another under Other

<meta http-equiv="content-language" content="en-us">

Page caching

Browsers cache pages by default Select the No-Cache option to stop caching of your page

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

Generator

The name of the program used to create your web page

<meta name="generator" content="Metty Online Version 1.0">

Window Target

Useful for preventing page framing

<meta http-equiv="window-target" content="_top">

Abstract

A brief summary of the description meta tag, under 100 words

<meta name="abstract" content="Viewpoints, Tools, and Content for Webmasters">

Comments

Comments are not actually meta tags Some search engines have used them instead of meta tags You may also want to add a comment as an FYI

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