Get to Know About Meta Tags

Meta Tags Introduction

Meta tags are not really useful. They are useful for search engines results when missing informations on your web document, they are not useful for ranking at all. There is some important meta tags to know about. You have to follow.

What is a meta tag ?

An HTML tag that appear in the <head> portion of the page. Meta tags supply information about a web page. Meta tags are an eTatoo in somehow.

It is also a particular HTML tag which provides a whole bunch of informations of a single web page. It provides informations about the author, date of creation, latest updates of the page, a swift description, and a set of keywords defining the web page.

1. Where are located the meta tags in a HTML document:

The meta tags are on the top of the html source code between the <head> tag and after the <title> tag. Here is a sample of the architecture:

<HEAD>
<TITLE>Web Design and Promotion tutorials</TITLE>
<META name="description" content="Leading resource for website promotion and design">
<META name="keywords" content="Css, web promotion, website, search engine, promotion, php">
<META name="robots" content="nofollow, index">
</HEAD>

1.1 List of meta tags and their meanings:

1.1.1 Title tag:

<TITLE>Search Engine Optimization Guide</TITLE>
This is the most important tag of all. Without it your webpage will never get indexed by search engines robots. It must explains briefly what your page is about.

This tag is the most important one if you want to perform a great keyword optimization, the first thing visitors will see on the search engines page results (SERP's) is your website title. Make it humanly readable though, do not use the keyword 'free' 5 times for instance.

1.1.2 Keywords:

<META name="keywords" content="Css, web promotion, website, search engine, promotion, php">
So here you got the keywords meta tag. You can fill up the keywords you want to use for your website content. Here is a good technique for creating relevant keywords meta tags from your web page.

1.1.3 Description:

<META name="description" content="Leading resource for website promotion and design via CSS and PHP">
Here goes the description of your website. Keep it simple!

1.1.4 Author and Copyright:

1.1.5 Revisit:

<META name="revisit-after" content="14 days">

With this meta tag, you tell the crawlers and spiders to revisit your website every 14 days (regarding the example).

1.1.6 Robots:

<META name="robots" content="nofollow, index">

This meta tag tells robots crawlers, spiders from internet if they have to index the web page, follow the links from the web page, or both. It also tells if they have to do not index or follow links on a web page.

<META name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">
Robots are not allowed to index the web page or follow the links

<META name="robots" content="index, nofollow">
The robots are allowed to index and follow links

<META name="googlebot" content="noindex, nofollow">
The robot google bot is allew to follow the links but not to index the web page.

<META name="robots" content="all">
Robots are allowed to follow links and index the web page.

<META name="robots" content="none">
Robots are not allowed to follow links and index.

1.1.7 Refresh:

<META http-equiv="refresh" content="180">

You can use this meta tag to reload and redirect Web pages. It's easy to use.

Here the page has to reload/refresh after 180 seconds so 3 minutes. It works only in seconds so do not add numbers lower than 10 if you do not redirect to another page.

Redirecting/Reloading, to another page, with the refresh meta tag:
<META http-equiv="refresh" content="2;url=http://www.google.com">

Here the page will have to redirect to google.com after 2 seconds. It is better to use a web hosting control panel system like cPanel to redirect to another page.

Notes:

- If the redirection is fast. The user will feel confused because he can't hit the back button. I don't know about you but i hate that.
- Some search engines consider this as a spam and your rank may be affected.

1.1.8 Language:

<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Language" content="EN">
The language meta tag defines what language is your website about.

Click here to see a list of languages you may use for this meta tag attributes.

Next step: How to use Meta tags Tips and Help

Get to Know About Meta Tags

Meta Tags Introduction

What is a meta tag ?

Notes:

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