Although Meta Tags do not have quite the impact that they used to have with optimizing a site for search engines, they can still help.
These days, search engines rely more heavily on the actual content within the web site, how often it is updated, backlinks, etc.
However, many people do not realize the vast amount of Meta Tags that are available. I thought it would be helpful to outline more of the Meta Tags that are not used as often to novice web designers. This post may be somewhat lengthy, but hopefully it will provide some usable information for your web sites.
So, here you go:
Meta Tag Elements
TITLE
Is placed at the top of your <head> </head> tags in your HTML document.
Note: FrontPage and other web page creation programs places the title where it wants to in the document between the <head> </head> tags. Remember to manually move the <title> of your web page to the uppermost top, below the <head> tag.
Never use more than 80 characters in your title.
<head>
<title>The Name Of Your Page</title>
</head>
PICS
The next element is called the PICS tag or label. It is not a necessity but it does help in showing spiders and web browsers your child safe rating for your site. You get your coding from Safe Surf or I.C.R.A. {one tag for each rating resource}.
More information can be attained here http://www.w3.org/pics
<meta http-equiv="PICS-Label" content='' ">
GENERATOR
This tag tells what web-publishing tool (program) you used to create the web page. It is not a necessary tag element so you do not have to use it but most web creation programs will use it for you anyway.
<meta name="generator" content=" ">
S-Bots
This Meta tag should always be used because it instructs the search engine robot (spider) what to do with your pages.
<meta name="robots" content=" ">
ALL - index all pages (some engines have a limit on how many pages can be indexed per site) and follow the hyperlinks to other pages.
INDEX - Index the specific page but do not follow the links.
FOLLOW - The search engine robots will follow and index linked pages.
NOINDEX - Continue onto linked pages but do not index current page.
NOFOLLOW - Do not follow the associated linked documents.
DISTRIBUTION
This Meta tag designates the scope of distribution of your document. This can be used for content control. Web servers will not service a local document to web visitors.
<meta name="distribution" content=" ">
GLOBAL
LOCAL
COPYRIGHT
This Meta tag clearly states, in a manner acceptable by prevailing laws, who owns the copyright of the document text or design. You should practice using this tag on ALL web pages.
<meta name="copyright" content="date | your name or name of company">
AUTHOR
The author Meta tag is used to declare the author of the web site or web page.
<meta name="author" content=" ">
LANGUAGE
This Meta tag identifies the language of the web page context.
You can edit the tags into any valid language and country code.
<meta http-equiv="language" content="eng">
<meta http-equiv="dialect" content="us">
Rating
This Meta tag is a simple site-rating scheme. This may be obsolete because of PICS label usage.
<meta name="rating" content="">
Safe For Kids
14 Years
General
Mature
Restricted
CLASSIFICATION
This Meta tag defines the site classification. This tag can and will be used some search engines to place your site in an appropriate category.
<meta name="classification" content=" ">
DOCUMENT EXPIRES
Caches to determine when to fetch a fresh copy of the associated document can use this Meta tag.
<meta http-equiv="expires" content=" ">
REPLY TO
This Meta tag is used to identify to whom the visitor should send comments or replies. This tag can be a nuisance since e-mail harvesters will search your web pages for this tag to harvest the e-mail address for the purposes of Spam. It is not recommended to use this tag any longer.
<meta http-equiv="reply-to" content=" ">
REVISIT
This Meta tag is used to inform the search bot/web crawler when it should revisit your web document to update its index.
The recommended usage of this tag is: NO LESS THAN 30 DAYS and NO MORE than 1 year.
<meta name="revisit-after" content="30 days">
PRAGMA
This Meta tag is used to inform the browser that it should retrieve a new copy of the document versus using a cached version.
<meta http-equiv="pragma" content="no-cache">
KEYWORDS META TAG
This Meta tag informs the search bot/web crawler what the main points are of the document it is reviewing. Never repeat any keyword more that 6 times within the keywords tag.
No more than 1000 characters in your keywords tag.
Never place words in your keywords tag that is not in the visual text of the body of your web page.
<meta name="keywords" content=" ">
Description Meta Tag
This Meta tag informs the search bot/web crawler or visitor, via a brief synopsis, what the page is all about.
No more than 200 characters should be used.
<meta name="description" content=" ">
Realistically, Meta Tags do indeed work but there is more to their creation and usage than placing a bunch of keywords into the keyword tag that you want your web site to be found for and embedding them into your web pages. There are several search engines that no longer place high relevance on several of the tags, but that should not stop you from using them in a correct manner.
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