Meta Tags What are Meta Tags And How Are They Best Used?

What?  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.  They are not visible to the user  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 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  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.

Author and Copyright Not necessary but an example:

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. (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. 

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)

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: My Web Page

Search Engine Quiz…  /quizzes/search_engine_quiz/blsear chenginequiz.htm