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Mail Bag · Posted: Oct 01, 2005 01:40pm Post subject: HTML META tag reference

Below is a list of some commonly used META tags. These META tags are usually added to the <HEAD> section of a webpage's HTML code in order to make the page more compatible with Search Engine Spiders. In the examples below, text that should be customized is in red.

For more information on these and other HTML tags, visit www.html-reference.com/

<title>MY HTML PAGE TITLE</title>

The <TITLE> tag is a required element in all HTML documents. The closing </TITLE> is required. Search engines generally use the title as the document name in the result of their searches.

<META http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en-us">

Specifies the language of the document. Robots such as those used by search engines may use this tag to categorize documents by language.

<META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">

Informs the browser which type of scripting language you are using by default.

<META name="description" content="Page description. Use words that appear in the title and page content.">

Some search engines pick up this description to show with the results of searches. To maximize your search engine ranking, be sure to use key words from your page content and your Keywords META tag within your description.

<META name="abstract" content="Secondary description. To maximize your search engine ranking, be sure to use keywords from your page content and Keywork META tag within your abstract tag description.">

Some search engines pick up this description to show with the results of searches. Used as a second description along with the description tag. To maximize your search engine ranking, be sure to use key words from your page content and your Keywords META tag within your description.

<META name="author" content="Name of the author of the document.">

Records the name of the author of the document.

<META name="copyright" content="Copyright ? 2003-2005 My Name Here, All Rights Reserved">

Used to include copyright information in the document.

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

This Metatag defines the audience for the document.

<META name="doc-class" content="Completed">

This Metatag indicates the working state of document.

<META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="index, follow">

Generally you should not need to worry about which pages within your site are indexed by the Google search engine (which uses the Googlebot spider). By default, Google will attempt to spider every page you have on your site. You can use the GOOGLEBOT Metatag to control exactly which pages are indexed by Google.

<META name="owner" content="Name of the owner of the document.">

Defines the owner, usually the name of the owner of a company or perhaps a company name.

<META name="rating" content="GENERAL">

This Metatag is made slightly obsolete by the PICS tag, but is still useful to put your site into a general classification. This tag has the advantage of being very simple.

<META name="resource-type" content="document">

Defines the type of document. Only allows one value (document) and it does not seem to be used.

<META NAME="revisit-after" CONTENT="30 days">

This is a very important tag as it tells the search engine how often to spider your page. Generally you should set this to between 30 days and one year.

<META NAME="Robots" CONTENT="index, follow">

You can use the ROBOTS Metatag to control exactly which pages are indexed by search engines. If you need to ensure precise control over what is and is not indexed on your site, use the more widely recognized robots.txt file.

<META name="keywords" content="Key, phrases, from, your, html, document">

The purpose of the keywords Metatag is to inform the spider or search engine of the main topics or points of a document. Due to extreme misuse of this Metatag, it's relevance in many search engines has been downgraded. Keywords in the tag should also appear within your content, description, title, alt tags and elsewhere within your document to be considered by the search engines.

Here are some good rules of thumbs when using keywords.
1. Limit keywords to under 1,000 characters.
2. Do not repeat keywords more than 3 times.
3. Use plural keywords.
4. Include misspellings and different cases.
5. Use only the Metatags that make sense for your document.
6. Don't repeat keywords hundreds of times in the Metatags, alt tags, description and text.

For more information on these and other HTML tags, visit www.html-reference.com/