Meta Lowdown

[syedasif]

I bet we all use various meta tags for describing our websites, naming the author, even for setting refresh rate. But there are a lot of meta tags out there. Anyone knows them all?

[stymiee]

To tell you the truth it isn't worth finding out. The only meta tags worth using are:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
<meta name="description" content="" />
<meta name="keywords" content="" />

And if you don't want the page to be craled and indexed:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" />

[syedasif]

Yea, I guess the others are not worth using much but I just wanna know what all I can use. In some sites I see like a list of meta tags. And I don't know some of them.

[Darren Hoyt]

Here are some tags that were suggested to me by a professional web marketing guy over a year ago, and I don't doubt some of them are limited in their usefulness:

<META NAME="allow-search" content="yes">
<META NAME="audience" content="all">
<meta name="description" content="">
<meta name="keywords" content="">
<meta name="robots" content="all, index, follow">
<META NAME="language" content="en">
<meta name="revisit-after" content="14 days">
<meta name="distribution" content="Global">
<META NAME="classification" content="(Category)">
<meta http-equiv="Pragma" content="no-cache">
<META NAME="MSSmartTagsPreventParsing" content="TRUE">
<meta name="rating" content="General">
<meta name="copyright" content="(Client Name)">

[stymiee]

He doesn't know what he is talking about. Most of those don't do anything at all. The description and keyword tags are the only one worth using and the robots tag should only to used to prevent the page from being listed. Otherwise it is redundant and useless.

[lostseed]

I use the same thing for every site of mine that goes like this:

For my FRONT PAGE ONLY:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<meta name="robots" content="noarchive" />
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow" />
<meta name="Distribution" content="Global" />
<meta name="keywords" content="jream.com" />
<meta name="description" content="jream" />

For all other pages,
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<meta name="robots" content="noarchive" />
<meta name="robots" content="index,follow" />
<meta name="Distribution" content="Global" />
<meta name="keywords" content="jream.com" />
<meta name="description" content="jream" />

Meta tags are really not important, I think they are becoming obselete with almost every search engine, except a few, forget the names.

I would ASSUME its safe to remove keywords/description, but I just leave it there for no reason and I stopped filling in all those words lol.

If this is a bad method PLEASE correct me, because I dont want to screw someone else up, and I dont wanna screw myself over haha.

[Darren Hoyt]

Yeah, they seemed to have limited purpose.

I've gotten the best search results with: using descriptive <title> content, descriptive <h1> & <h2> content and descriptive creative page names. Also helps to wrap anchor tags around particularly relevant key phrases and link them to internal pages. I guess there's no silver bullet.

[stymiee]

I use the same thing for every site of mine that goes like this:

For my FRONT PAGE ONLY:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<meta name="robots" content="noarchive" />
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow" />
<meta name="Distribution" content="Global" />
<meta name="keywords" content="jream.com" />
<meta name="description" content="jream" />

For all other pages,
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<meta name="robots" content="noarchive" />
<meta name="robots" content="index,follow" />
<meta name="Distribution" content="Global" />
<meta name="keywords" content="jream.com" />
<meta name="description" content="jream" />

Meta tags are really not important, I think they are becoming obselete with almost every search engine, except a few, forget the names.

I would ASSUME its safe to remove keywords/description, but I just leave it there for no reason and I stopped filling in all those words lol.

If this is a bad method PLEASE correct me, because I dont want to screw someone else up, and I dont wanna screw myself over haha.

Why would you not want your homepage indexed????

[syedasif]

Search engines do not look up meta tags?! Guys, this is really news for me. So in the end it boils down to writing well-formed and logical markup. Thankfully, I am quite a standards-freak and I do try to write some correct markup most of the time.

Why would you not want your homepage indexed????

BTW, what's up with the whole indexing thing? I am not in on this stuff. I am guessing its all SEO-centric.

[Nadia P]

Search engines do not look up meta tags?! Guys, this is really news for me. So in the end it boils down to writing well-formed and logical markup.

Content is king. Make sure you have plenty of keywords in your copy and use H1 tags appropriately.

BTW, what's up with the whole indexing thing? I am not in on this stuff. I am guessing its all SEO-centric.

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" />

this means that you don't want the SEs to index your page - but I have no idea why you would want to use something like this anyway. Doesn't everybody want their index page spidered? ;-)

Nadia

[syedasif]

Alright. So Indexing makes our website figure out in the Search Engine list.