how to set up meta tags |
What are Meta tags?
Meta tags are made to provide SE robots important information about your website, and moreover, how to deal with it. Without, or with incorrect Meta tags your website would be a bunch of pages which anonymously floating in the middle of internet vacuum. For example, keywords tag provides to SE your keywords which makes connection between search request and search results,
description tag is used to display description below search result, etc... It's 7 or 8 most common used Meta tags, but only 2 of them are really important, description tag and keywords tag. Without them SE spider will have difficulties crawling your website and could leave it unindexed. There's a lot of reasons why are Meta tags so important for the website and SE robots. I'll describe it more specifically in the next lines.
I also recommend to use a handy freeware software - METAedit to create your Meta tags correctly. |
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what are they used for |
Most common META tags
Description META tag is used to display a short description, about your website , below the title shown on the top of search result. If you check out Google home page with some search results on it, you will see that's only 2 lines of description shown below the title of
the result. It's usually about 15-20 words, or about 160 characters including spaces between them.
So, make sure that is clearly described whole website in first 8-10 words of Description tag. From my opinion, that's what ordinary surfer usually reads.
Sample: <META NAME="description" CONTENT="Put your description here.">
Keyword META tag is used by SE robots in order to establish sensible connection between search request and search result. It means basically, if Mike type into Google search bar a simple word "dinner" as a search request, and John, on the other side, has a website which tells, where can you have a good dinner in the town, by putting a word "dinner" in the Keyword Meta tag, SE robot will find John's website and provide it to Mike as a search results. That's why is very important that keywords, which are inside Keyword Meta tag, must be highly relevant with the content of your page. Another important thing si density of the keywords used in the page which should be between 4-8 % of total text in the page. Overuse of keywords, most SE robots defines as keyword forcing, which is one of the common SEO mistakes.
Sample: <META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="keyword1, keyword2, keyword3...">
Robots META tag is used to instruct SE robots to crawl your website, or not , in order to include or exclude pages or files which you don't like to be crawled. It is a bit confusing how to use this Meta tag. No harm if you don't use it at all, because SE robots are set to follow and index by default, but if you want to do inversely, nofollow and noindex, it won't index entire website. So, you need to combine it with a Robots.txt file which instructs SE robots more specifically, by it's Disallow* function, what files, pages or entire folders you want to leave uncrowned and unindexed. Unfortunately, many of SE robots doesn't actually read Robots.txt file. My recommendation on this topic will be, if you don't want your website to be crawled, use nofollow and noindex option, otherwise, use the option shown below in combination with Robots.txt file uploaded in you root folder along with index page of your website.
Sample: <META NAME="robots" CONTENT="INDEX,FOLLOW"> (SE robots default option)
Seems SE robots might not read your Robots.txt file, it would be wise if you specify these orders directly in Robots META tag. Insert the path to the file in CONTENT of Robots META tag along with commands, like this CONTENT="/folder/images/photo.jpg NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW" or if you want uncrowned one type of file then do like this CONTENT=".rar NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW"
Just be
very careful how do you use INDEX, NOINDEX and FOLLOW, NOFOLLOW commands. INDEX means - crawl, and FOLLOW means - follow links forward. Download instructions to set up Robots.txt file and Robots META tag here.
Abstract META tag is pretty much the same as a Description Meta tag, but much shorter. It is just an abstraction, one short descriptive phrase. This Meta tag in not of great importance to SE robots, but it could be an quick impulse to SE robot start viewing your content.
Sample: <META NAME="abstract" CONTENT="Put abstract phrase here.">
Revisit META Tag is used by SE robots in order to define how often should be crawled some website. It's usually suggested to setup every 30 days, but I personally believe, it depends a lot more on how often you are updating websites content. SE robots are very sophisticated machines and they are able to learn that a particular website is updated more often, and should be revisited more often.
Sample: <META NAME="revisit-after" CONTENT="... days">
Language META tag defines the language used on the page. This Meta tag is optional to use, because SE robots are able to determine which language is used in the page easily by it self. However, those SE robots which index websites based on the language uses this Meta tag more often. It's also preferable for non-english language websites. These are supported languages: BG (Bulgarian), CS (Czech), DA (Danish), DE (German), EL (Greek), EN (English), EN-GB (English-Great Britain), EN-US (English-United States), ES (Spanish), ES-ES (Spanish-Spain), FI (Finnish), HR (Croatian), IT (Italian), FR (French), FR-CA (French-Quebec), FR-FR (French-France), IT (Italian), JA (Japanese), KO (Korean), NL (Dutch), NO (Norwegian), PL (Polish), PT (Portuguese), RU (Russian), SV (Swedish), ZH (Chinese).
Sample: <META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Language" CONTENT="xx">
Author META Tag tells the authors data of the particular website, or defines it's redistribution terms. Usually provided information in this Meta tag are name of the author or webmaster, company name, webmasters e-mail address or just websites URL. This Meta tag is also optional to use.
Sample: <META NAME="author" CONTENT="Authors information here">
Refresh META Tag is not actually recommended to use on the pages that you have submit to SE. It's mostly used for redirection or refreshing visitors with another page after a few seconds, so call, transit or bridge page. Automatically redirection or unexpected transferring visitors to another web page is considered as unwanted activities, which gives opportunity for spammers to abuse SE, and over-occupy their databases. It is not recommended to use this Meta tag!!!
Sample: <META HTTP-EQUIV="refresh" CONTENT="sec?!;URL=http://website.com"> |
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what are they look like |
Where should it be placed?
Meta Tags are short lines of HTML code placed right below the Title tag in HEAD section of your page. It's mostly used only in the index page of your website, because SE robots are instructed by Robots Meat tag to follow links to rest of the website. Meta tag are not visible part of web page to humans eyes, and don't try somehow, to do it.
Meta tags must be listed this way!
1.) <head>
2.) <title>Money on the web</title>
3.) <META NAME="description" CONTENT="Put your description here.">
4.)
<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="keyword1, keyword2, keyword3...">
5.)
<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="FOLLOW,INDEX">
6.)
<META NAME="abstract" CONTENT="Put abstract phrase here.">
7.)
<META NAME="revisit-after" CONTENT="... days">
8.)
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Language" CONTENT="xx">
9.)
<META NAME="author" CONTENT="Authors information here">
10.) </head>
11.) <body>
12.) Content of your page goes in the BODY section of HTML code... |
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other html tags |
Other important HTML tags...
Every HTML document, or what we usually call, web page has many different tags which are of great importance to display web page correctly. From DOCTYPE tag used to identify what type of HTML document is about, to the simple Comment tag which is used to put invisible notes between lines of code, there is a big number of HTML tags. Almost a hundred of them.
Fortunately, most of the tags are inserted by HTML editors automatically or with minor assistance of webmaster, so let's stick to those who need our assistance to work properly.
Title tag is essential tag to every HTML document. It defines title / name of the web page which is first thing that SE robot checks out. So, it's important to choose title as much is possible related to content of the web page, but I wouldn't recommended just to copy and paste your keywords it the title. It will be enough effective to put your company name along with short description, what is your company about. For example, if you run a petrol station called "Bush & Sons", using for your title only "Bush & Sons" you are limited to those who are searching only for "Bush" or "Sons" or "Bush & Sons", which could be very small number of them. Using a short description along with name, like this "Bush & Sons - Best petrol station in the town", you are increasing number of potentially visitors, by those who are looking for petrol stations in generally. Don't do to long titles like two or more sentences
Sample: *<title>Bush & Sons - Best petrol station in the town</title>*
Heading tags are used to define font size, from h1 which is biggest, to h6 which is smallest. Many web designers often use ordinary font sizes from editors properties panel, instead of Heading tags. It's also a big SEO mistake. Using Heading tags along with Style Sheets enables you to have so many different Heading styles, and combinations. SE robots robots gladly reads Heading tags of the web page, so it's also disposedly to put inside text related to content of the web page which includes on or two keywords.
Sample: *<h1> Heading text here </h1>*
Body tag is the container of all visible content to humans eyes. All information about background, colors, margins, text, images, links, etc... There is usually a few more commands included in the Body tag, which determines all attributes of page.
They are:
Background
-background-color: #000000;
-background-image: url(images/background.gif);
-background-repeat: repeat-x;
-margin-left: 20px;
-margin-top: 20px;
-margin-right: 20px;
-margin-bottom: 20px;
Text
-font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
-font-size: 10px;
-color: #FFFFFF;
Links
-a:link = color: #666666;
-a:visited = color: #666666;
-a:hover = color: #CCCCCC;
-a:active =
color: #666666;
Sample of Body tag: *<body> The content of the document...... </body>*
*The next HTML tag is indeed optional, but people often use it, instead JavaScript or some flash object, because it's really simple!!!
Blink tag is used to make blinking text somewhere on the page. It's an easy way to point visitors attention to something you think that is important. It is also possible to apply CSS to tag content.
Sample: <blink></blink>
Warning! This HTML tag is not supported by IE browser without inserting a small portion of code in the HEAD section of your web page. This code effects only to IE 4+.
<script>
function doBlink() {
var blink = document.all.tags("BLINK")
for (var i=0; i < blink.length; i++)
blink[i].style.visibility = blink[i].style.visibility == "" ? "hidden" : ""
}
function startBlink() {
if (document.all) setInterval("doBlink()",500)
}
window.onload = startBlink;
</script> |
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