Meta Tags Tutorial part 4
Robot Meta NAME Tags
I call these Meta NAME tags Robot tags because search robots use them.
The various search engines (like Yahoo and AltaVista) read these tags and
store what they find.
When you run a search, these stored tags are what are scanned and/or
displayed.
Therefore, it is important to use these tags to maximize the chance of
attracting someone to your page.
Make sure each of your pages has a title, and not something vague like
"index" or "My Home Page", or, even worse, "Insert Title Here".
Use something descriptive that will attract people to your site; this is
one of the things they will see when they find your page in a search.
Do not use the same description in the title and the first few tags
below, although of course there may be some overlap.
All tags are of the form:
<META NAME="keyword" CONTENT="text">
Description
This is what is displayed when someone runs a web page search with
AltaVista or a similar engine.
If you do not have a description, the first few lines of your page will be
displayed, but not formatted, which tends to turn them into gibberish.
Keywords
Single keywords or phrases that describe your page, separated by commas.
A single search may find multiple keywords, so be complete.
Try to stay under 50 words, and you should not put the same word in
multiple times.
However, it is a good idea to include variations of a word and common
spelling errors.
Subject
Self-explanatory.
Actually, I was not able to find any references to this keyword when I
wrote this tutorial, although I've been using the keyword on my pages for
a long time.
I admit, my subject lines are very similar to my titles.
Author
Another obvious keyword.
Not important, but it is nice to record your name somewhere.
Robots
This tag limits what search robots may do with your pages.
By default, the current page will be added to the search index, and the
robot will follow all your links to other pages.
Possible values (separated by commas) are:
- "all"
- The default. Same as "index, follow".
- "index"/"noindex"
- Do/do not store this page in the index.
- "follow"/"nofollow"
- Do/do not follow links on this page.
- "none"
- Same as "noindex, nofollow".
When would you use this tag?
I use "noindex" on pages that are part of a frameset and may not be
displayed by themselves, such as menus and banners.
You could use "nofollow" on a page full of links, because you want to
record your own pages in the search database, not pages belonging to other
people.