SpydarGrafix³  META Tags
Tags Covered
[Desciption] - [Keywords] - [Robots]
[Revisit-After] - [Author] - [Copyright]
     Meta tags are a great way of getting your pages into the search engines such as YAHOO!, Excite, GOTO.com, HOTBOT and others! Search engines allow people to look for a certain topic or interest and the search engine responds by displaying links to pages that are about that topic or interest.
     Meta tags are not seen by the people who come to your site. The search engines send out “ROBOTS” or “SPIDERS” that read your page and look for these tags. This way the search engine can find out what your site is about and it allows you to set up keywords for people to look for so that they can find your site. Some “ROBOTS or SPIDERS” will also read all of the text on your page to be sure that your site does, indeed, contain the topic that you say it does. Don't let that scare you though! These tags are not hard to learn. We will show you the most important ones so that your site can be “INDEXED” by the search engines and you can get even more visitors than you have been getting!



Now, to begin with, you'll need to open up NotePad or your favorite HTML editor and type in the following for practice: 
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Meta Tags</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>

</BODY>
</HTML>
Now, the first tag we will learn about is the DESCRIPTION tag. This tag allows the search engine to include a nice description for your site. It looks like this:

<META NAME="description" CONTENT="The site description goes here">

Meta tags always go inside of the <HEAD> and </HEAD> tags like so: 
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Meta Tags</TITLE>
<META NAME="description" CONTENT="The site description goes here">
</HEAD>
<BODY>

</BODY>
</HTML>
When you write a description for your site be sure to make it as complete as possible, but short.



Now we come to the KEYWORDS tag. This tag contains words seperated by commas. If you had a site about cats, your very first keyword might be "cats". If you have a site only about persian cats, you might have "persian, cats" as keywords. Just try to think of what words you might search for to find your site. It looks like this:

<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="keywords, seperated, by, commas">

Meta tags always go inside of the <HEAD> and </HEAD> tags like so: 
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Meta Tags</TITLE>
<META NAME="description" CONTENT="The site description goes here">
<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="keywords, seperated, by, commas">
</HEAD>
<BODY>

</BODY>
</HTML>
You can have a lot of keywords, or just a few.



The META tag called ROBOTS is a very interesting one. It allows you to guide the robots or spiders that the search engines send to your site! It has a few variations that you can use. The tag looks like this:

<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="INDEX">

The options for CONTENT are: When the robot is told to "FOLLOW" it will look for the ROBOT Meta tag on the other pages as well, so it will know if it should index the page, or not, or just keep following links.
REMEMBER! Meta tags always go inside of the <HEAD> and </HEAD> tags like so: 
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Meta Tags</TITLE>
<META NAME="description" CONTENT="The site description goes here">
<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="keywords, seperated, by, commas">
<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="INDEX">
</HEAD>
<BODY>

</BODY>
</HTML>
We suggest using INDEX or INDEX,FOLLOW in this tag.



The Revisit-after Meta Tag lets you tell the robot or spider when to update your listing in the search engine...Isn't that cool? This tag looks like this:

<META NAME="revisit-after" CONTENT="30 days">

Keep all of your META tags together: 
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Meta Tags</TITLE>
<META NAME="description" CONTENT="The site description goes here">
<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="keywords, seperated, by, commas">
<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="INDEX">
<META NAME="revisit-after" CONTENT="30 days">
</HEAD>
<BODY>

</BODY>
</HTML>
30 days is usually a good starting place, but you can make this anything that you want, but less than 30 days may not work on a lot of the robots and spiders.



The AUTHOR Meta tag is used to show who created the page. When you write a page add this tag to it so if the robots or spiders need to know who wrote the page, they'll know it was YOU!

<META NAME="author" CONTENT="Your Name Here">

Keep all of your META tags together: 
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Meta Tags</TITLE>
<META NAME="description" CONTENT="The site description goes here">
<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="keywords, seperated, by, commas">
<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="INDEX">
<META NAME="revisit-after" CONTENT="30 days">
<META NAME="author" CONTENT="YOUR NAME HERE">
</HEAD>
<BODY>

</BODY>
</HTML>
Remember to replace YOUR NAME HERE with your name!!



The COPYRIGHT Meta tag is very important. If you write a poem or create a cool graphic you would want to copyright it to keep others from using your work, right? This will not keep people from taking your work, but it's one step in protecting your hard work.

<META NAME="copyright" CONTENT="1999 YOUR NAME or COMPANY HERE">

Keep all of your META tags together: 
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Meta Tags</TITLE>
<META NAME="description" CONTENT="The site description goes here">
<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="keywords, seperated, by, commas">
<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="INDEX">
<META NAME="revisit-after" CONTENT="30 days">
<META NAME="author" CONTENT="YOUR NAME HERE">
<META NAME="copyright" CONTENT="1999 YOUR NAME or COMPANY HERE">
</HEAD>
<BODY>

</BODY>
</HTML>
Remember to replace YOUR NAME or COMPANY HERE with your name or company!!



After you add these simple tags to your HTML pages and upload them to your site, you'll be ready to submit your pages to the search engines! Here are some places to go to submit:

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