|
Topics: controversial role of Meta tag when optimizing
a site for Google. Useful Meta's and useless ones...
<html>
<head>
<title>KEYWORDS HERE</title>
<meta name="keywords"
content="what who where and why">
</head>
Here is the first controversy. Unlike other search
engines like HotBot and Infoseek, our opinion is that Google ignores
meta tags: studying it we have noticed that its spiders are design to
act "like a human being would". This can explain why Google doesnt take
in great consideration something an eye cannot see.
Assumed that we have also to warn you about a thing: correct meta tags won't help you in
optimizing for Google, but misleading meta tags could cause your site
to be penalized.
 As
shown in lines above, Google does not use meta tags such as "keywords"
or "description" because the text in these tags cannot be seen by your
site's visitors. This means that Google gets your page theme from the
first few lines of text on your page, this means you have to have your
keywords and phrases right at the top, if it finds them your page
becomes more relevant.
Most important Meta Tags are
<meta name="keywords"
content="wow, yeah, random, freedom, wish-you-were-here">
for google's optimization purposes, commas are not required; be aware
that ALL keywords you include in this tag MUST appear somewhere on the
page.
<meta name="description"
content="this site talks about wow, yeah, random, freedom and we wish
you were here">
tip: put in the content attribute of the keywords meta
tag the same words in the title tag with no comma. Do the same for
decription meta tag
Other META TAGS
Remember what This tutorial is supposed to be: a theorical and
practical tool to optimize your site according to Google's algorithm
and pagerank.
We're not saying META TAGS are unuseful at all, we only say that if you
want a good ranking on Google, you don't need to hard-code your html
with meta tags usually ignored.
Anyway, if Google is just ONE of the search engine you'd like to see
your site indexed on, here is a list of meta tags that can suit your
needs.
<meta
http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
won't help and causes a double loading in Netscape browsers - like a
'flash effect' someone says...
<META
http-equiv="Content-Language" CONTENT="HR">
The Language META tag declares to users the natural language of the
document being indexed. Search engines which index websites based on
language often read this tag to determine which language(s) is
supported. This tag is particularly useful for non-english and multiple
language websites.
BG (Bulgarian)
CS (Czech)
DA (Danish)
DE (German)
EL (Greek)
EN (English)
EN-GB (English-Great Britain)
EN-US (English-United States)
ES (Spanish)
ES-ES (Spanish-Spain)
FI (Finnish)
HR (Croatian)
IT (Italian)
FR (French)
FR-CA (French-Quebec)
FR-FR (French-France)
IT (Italian)
JA (Japanese)
KO (Korean)
NL (Dutch)
NO (Norwegian)
PL (Polish)
PT (Portuguese)
RU (Russian)
SV (Swedish)
ZH (Chinese)
<META name="Abstract"
content="Abstract phrase">
Foolish…gives the spider an other kind of your site overview…
<META name="Author"
content="Author Information">
Optional at all. Gives information about the author like his name,
email, wesite address
<META name="Copyright"
content="Copyright Statement">
Defines copyright informations about the document
<META name="Distribution"
content="Global">
States the level of distribution of the web page - Global (general use)
| Local (local use and distribution)| IU (internal use of the document)
<META name="Expires"
content="Tue, 01 Jun 1999 19:58:02 GMT">
Note: Requires RFC1123 date as shown above
Indicates to search engines when the content on your website will expire
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh"
content="X;URL=http://www.website.com/index.html">
x=number of seconds before refresh or redirection
DONT USE IT EVEN IF SOMEONE IS
TORTURING YOU! search engines discourage this type of META tag
because it opens opportunity for users to spam search engines with
similar pages which all lead to the same page. In addition, this also
makes many of the search engines databases cluttered with irrelevant
and multiple versions of the same data.
If you HAVE TO redirect a page, for any
honest reasons, use an external javascript.
<META name="Revisit-After"
content="X Days">
how many days the search engine should revisit your webpage…useless at
all. Search engines, Google first, do not
accept any orders
<META name="Robots"
content="index,follow">
supported attributes: index | follow| noindex | nofollow
Googlebot, also known as Google spider, is an automated
mechanism that spiders your site, and collects and archives
informations about your site's content. Typically, a website owner
would submit the main page and Googlebot would visit your site and
collect all subpages and related links from your main page. However,
this tag enables you to control which pages you would like spidered,
and which to ignore. For instance, there are certain webpages and
directories (ie: CGI Scripts) that you may not want to be indexed in
search engines. Using the robots tag, you can define which pages to
follow, which to index and which to ignore completely.
:
better using THIS tag than robots.txt
|
|