Intro to Meta Tags
Search engines are getting more advanced every day, but some of them are still using meta tags to rank websites in their index. Learning how to effectively use them can increase the traffic to your website for free.
Where meta tags are placed
When you insert meta tags into your website, you put them within the <HEAD> </HEAD> area of your website. Generally they are placed after the <TITLE> tags, but the order is not important.
Common meta tags
<meta name="description" content="How to use meta tags effectively.">
The description tag is used by some search engines as the description in the search results. Its pretty self explainatory, just the description of the page.
<meta name="keywords" content="meta, tags, html, tutorials">
The keywords tag tells search engines what keywords your site is relavent to. Not all search engines use this tag anymore, because some are more advanced (like Google) and they generate the keywords for your page from the actual content on the page. However some still use these tags primarily.
<meta name="author" content="Tim Linden">
This tag is basically there to tell who is the author of the page. I don’t know of any search engines or tools that use this information, but it doesn’t hurt to have it.
<meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOINDEX,FOLLOW">
This tag can be very usefull if you don’t want search engines to index your page.
- NOINDEX tells the crawler to not index anything.
- NOFOLLOW tells it to not follow any links on the page.
- NOIMAGEINDEX tells the search engine not to index your images
- NOIMAGECLICK tells the search engine to not link directly to images, but to your pages
- NOARCHIVE tells the search engine not to cache your pages
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="5;url=http://clixnetwork.com">
You can use this tag to tell the browser to refresh or redirect to a page after so many seconds. In the example above, 5 is the number of seconds to wait. If you enter 0 it will redirect immediately. I would not recommend using this page if your page has been permanently moved, instead I would use .htaccess because it tells search engines the change while this meta tag does not.
<meta http-equiv="pragma" content="nocache">
This tag will tell browsers not to save a copy of the page to your hard drive. Browsers do this on recently viewed pages so if you hit your back button it can come up immediately. The problem is sometimes the pages are there for a bit longer than you’d like, so the user doesnt see the changes. Note that this does not tell search engines or proxies to not cache the page.
<meta http-equiv="expires" content="Mon, 7 Mar 2005 9:30:00 GMT">
This tag tells the browser when the page is out of date. So if you want the page to be cached, but know you update your site every 14 days, you can put one of these tags in your page and the browser will cache the page, but get a new copy after that date.
