Meta Tags have long been used by Search Engines to Index your Website into their Directories.
Although there have been abuses of Meta Data by SEO Firms which have changed how Robots use this information it is probably still a good idea to include it if it is not too much trouble.
<META>tags are placed in the <head> area in your webpages. They can contain commands and descriptions and sometimes your blog or website software can include these tags automatically. If not then you will have to find a way to add them to your header area in your website template or html files.
Lets look at some of the more popular <META> tags.
Controlling Robots
There are 2 settings which can be turned on and off
Index this page INDEX, NOINDEX
Follow links on this page FOLLOW, NOFOLLOW
<head>
<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW”>
</head>
You can also mix and match the index and follow command for instance you could ask the robot not to index this page but follow links to other pages.
<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, FOLLOW”>
Or you could ask it to index this page but not follow links to other pages.
<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”INDEX, NOFOLLOW”>
Content Type Descriptions
Now every page you make should have a doctype descriptor as the first line. This is pretty much a mandatory descriptor today because our browsers read in many different file and content types. Meta Descriptors are used for indexing your content and can also include content type and language type instructions.
<meta http-equiv=”content-type” content=”text/html; charset=US-ASCII” />
<meta http-equiv=”content-language” content=”en-us” />
Content Author Information
It is important to include a human readable copyright notice on your pages but you can also include this information in your meta tags. You can include the Author, Contact info or email and Copyright info.
<meta http-equiv=”author” content=”Jimmy Smith” />
<meta http-equiv=”contact” content=jimmysmith@jimmysmith.com />
<meta name=”copyright” content=”Copyright (c)2001 Jimmy Smith. All Rights Reserved.” />
Search Engine Keywords and Descriptions
Keywords and Descriptions in Meta Tags are not often used anymore because some SEO firms would get fake placement in search engines by manipulating this data. But it is probably not a bad idea to include it anyway until it has been officially deprecated.
<meta name=”description” content=”Jimmy Smith Talks about Farming” />
<meta name=”keywords” content=”cows, chickens, oranges, farming, lemons, tractors” />
Other Uses
Meta Data can be used for for any type of descriptive information and some companies such as child safe search engines and website blocking software read the meta tags to see the Rating of the website you are visiting. This information is voluntary by the website owner but if your visitor is using website blocking software and you do not include this tag they will not be able to load your webpages.
an example of such a tag would be:
<meta http-equiv=”pics-label” content='(pics-1.1 “http://www.icra.org/ratingsv02.html” >
