Date: Mon Apr 30, 2001 9:22 pm
Subject: Meta Tags - beyond the basics

From WebProNews - April 30, 2001- The Daily eZine for eBusiness Executives

Everything You Need to Know About Meta Tags

There's a plethora of different META Tags that you can make use of on your site. Because there are so many, it's impossible for me to cover all of them in this article. However, I will describe the most common ones. But let's start from the beginning, shall we?

What Are META Tags?

META tags are similar to standard HTML tags. However, there is one big difference: You have to insert all META tags between the tags on your page(s). META tags are used primarily to include information about a document. The META tags will be invisible to your site's visitors, but will be seen by browsers and search engines.

For The Search Engines

Several of the major search engines make use of the META Keyword tag, and virtually all of them make use of the Description tag. These tags help the search engine spider determine the content of your web site so that it can be indexed properly.

This is what they look like:

<META name="keywords" content="widgets, widget guide">
<META name="description" content="The ultimate guide to Widget design!">

You can also instruct the search engine robot/spider how to index your site using the robots META Tag. This is what it looks like:

<META name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">

What the tag above does is tell the spider not to index the page that it appears on, and not to follow the links on that page. Here's a complete list of attributes for the robots tag:

index - the default, the page is added to the search engine database

noindex - the page is not added to the search engine database

nofollow - the spider doesn't follow the links on that page

none - same as "noindex, no follow"

To use any of these attributes simply replace the "noindex,nofollow" text in the example above with whatever you want to use. If you need to use more than one attribute, seperate them with a comma.

Client Pull

Have you ever seen a page that automatically refreshes to another URL after a few seconds? Did you ever wondered how it was done? I'll tell you. The page made use of one of the http-equiv META Tags to automatically "pull" you to a different page after a few seconds. Here's what the code looks like:

<META http-equiv="refresh" content="1; url=newpage.htm">

The value of content denotes how many seconds will pass before the new page is called for. If you want it to happen as soon as a person hits that page, then set the value to "0".

Prevent Caching

If you want to prevent a page being saved in your visitor's cache you can do so by inserting the following three tags:


<META HTTP-EQUIV="expires" CONTENT="0">
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Pragma" CONTENT="no-cache">
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Cache-Control" CONTENT="no-cache">

Why would you want a page not to be cached? If your site is updated frequently and you always want your visitors to see the newest content/changes, or if you want to ensure that a new banner is loaded each time from your server when a page is accessed, you'll want to use the tags above.

A quick note here on banner caching: In addition to using the tags above, you'll want to append random numbers at the end of the tag calling the image. The ad serving software that I use, Spinbox, does this for me.

Rating Your Content

By using the rating META tag on your site, you can specify the appropriateness of your web site for kids. The tag looks like this:

<META name="rating" content="general">
In addition to the general rating, you can use three others. They are:
mature
restricted
14 years


Misc. Tags

Below I've listed several other popular tags that you may have seen around the web.

The generator META tag is used to specify what program was used to create your web site. Many HTML editing tools automatically insert this so that a company can gauge their market penetration. The tag looks like this:

The author tag is used to identify the author of a page. Simply replace "author's name" with your name or email address.

<META name="author" content="author's name">
The copyright tag identifies the individual or company that holds the copyright to a particular page. This is what it looks like:

<META name="copyright" content="This page and all its contents are copyright 1997-1999 by Matt Mickiewicz. All Rights Reserved.">
Tip: If you want a quick way to generate the META Keyword, Description, and no-cache tags try MetaTag Generator http://www.webmasterbase.com/free/metagen.php3

by Matt Mickiewicz