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View Full Version : Witch meta tags to use?

crifer
17-01-2002, 18:42/06:42PM
Is there any other important meta tags to use exept the base tags like:

<META NAME="Keywords" CONTENT="">
<META NAME="Description" CONTENT="">
<META NAME="Author" CONTENT="">
<META NAME="Copyright" CONTENT="">
<META NAME="Creator" CONTENT="">
<META NAME="Robots" CONTENT="All">

Or do i have to use all of the ones above ?
Hope
17-01-2002, 18:48/06:48PM
<META NAME="Keywords" CONTENT=""> Definately use.
<META NAME="Description" CONTENT=""> Definately use.
<META NAME="Author" CONTENT=""> No reason to use.
<META NAME="Copyright" CONTENT=""> No reason to use.
<META NAME="Creator" CONTENT=""> No reason to use.
<META NAME="Robots" CONTENT="All"> Use robots.txt instead.


Heidi
crifer
17-01-2002, 18:59/06:59PM
Thanks Hope, all i needed to know :)
Hope
17-01-2002, 19:05/07:05PM
You're welcome. This is what we are here for.

Heidi
sanity
17-01-2002, 22:37/10:37PM
Hi crifer :hi:

You may want to keep in mind that only Alta Vista and Inktomi really pay much attention to Meta Tags these days. I agree with others that they are worth including but not spending too much time on...

sanity
glengara
18-01-2002, 02:20/02:20AM
And if you feel strongly about it:
<META NAME ="MSSmartTagsPreventParsing" CONTENT="TRUE">
SimpleQuery
27-01-2002, 11:36/11:36AM
That is interesting. Please continue.
ihelpyou
27-01-2002, 11:42/11:42AM
Welcome to the forums SimpleQuery! :hi:

What would you like specifically to continue with in the thread?
Advisor
27-01-2002, 11:45/11:45AM
I'd just like to say that in my opinion, it won't hurt you to use some of those other tags, but they're certainly not necessary for high rankings. They may have other purposes, however.

Jill
ihelpyou
27-01-2002, 11:51/11:51AM
Yep, they may be used for other purposes but I am of the opinion that the tags serve to give a SE spider more code to wade through before getting to the 'meat' of what you wish to have indexed and what you wish to have considered in ranking. I see the minuses of using the extra tags outweighing the pluses.
g1smd
06-10-2002, 08:56/08:56AM
My 'minimum' header has all of this:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">

<HTML>

<HEAD>
<TITLE> Your Title Here </TITLE>
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Language" CONTENT="EN-GB">
<META NAME="Keywords" CONTENT=" your keyword list here ">
<META NAME="Description" CONTENT=" Your Description Here. ">
</HEAD>

<BODY>

The Title, Keywords, and Description are useful to some search engines (and the Title is displayed by the Browser along the top of the window). The DocType is useful for Validation and to tell the browser what version of HTML is being used. The Character Set and Content Language tags are going to become more important in search engines in the future. They also help with online translation tools, and help visitors to your web site that use other settings as their default.

Additional items such as Copyright, Distribution, PICS rating, and others are left for you to decide. As XML becomes more popular, then all the 'DC.Description', and so on, tags will become more well known, but can be safely ignored by most people for now.


I will sometimes also add:

<META NAME="MSSmartTagsPreventParsing" CONTENT="TRUE">
<META NAME="Generator" CONTENT="Wordpad">
<META NAME="Author" CONTENT="Your Name Here">
<META NAME="Date" CONTENT="2002-09-30">


Any more is usually overkill; but some commercial entities like to add a Copyright line, just to keep their corporate bean counters happy; not that it can easily be enforced.


After writing all this stuff the last job is to send the page to http://validator.w3.org/ and get the HTML syntax checked out for errors.