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Using meta tags can help search engines to better
catalog your web page, help users find your page from
a search engine, or prevent a search engine from taking
contact information from your site. (Printer
friendly version)
Meta tags are additional tags that you put in between
the <head> </head> tags. The purpose is
to give additional information to the browser and
search engines looking at your page. The user will
not see this information unless they look at the source
code. An example of a meta tag follows:
<meta name="robots"
content="ALL">
This is the meta tag that you can give instructions
to search engines. In this tag, the word "meta"
is standard, it does not change, the "name"
and "content" attributes are required. The
value to name, in this case "robots" will
change for each meta tag used, though you may not
create your own values. The value for the content
attribute can change as well, but what you put in
there depends on the type of meta tag being used.
For the robot meta tag, the acceptable content values
are "all", "follow", "index",
"nofollow", and "noindex". "All"
means to do a follow and index. "Follow"
tells the search engine to spider down through every
link on your page . "Index" means you want
the search engine to catalog your information. "Nofollow"
means ignore all the links, and "noindex"
basically tells the search engine to ignore the page
completely. A good choice if the page contains email
addresses or other contact data that you don't want
readily findable.
However, the documentation on this tag describes
the above behavior for a "polite" search
engine. It is very possible for a user to create a
search engine that will ignore the robots meta tag
and catalog your page and data anyway.
Here are some examples of other available meta tags:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;
charset=iso-8859-1">
<meta name="resource-type" content="document">
<meta name="revisit-after" content="60
days">
<meta name="description" content="Brown
University's site to assist campus web publishers.
Many areas of web publishing are covered from the
novice through the programmer. Suggestions for improvement
are always appreciated.">
<meta name="robots" content="ALL">
<meta name="distribution" content="Global">
<meta name="rating" content="Safe
For Kids">
<meta name="copyright" content="Brown
University">
<meta name="author" content="CIS
Dept., Brown University">
<meta name="language" content="en-us">
<meta name="keywords" content="web,
publishing, CIS, internet, www, help, webpub, publisher,
campus, Brown, University, college">
These meta tags tell the search engine or browser
some valuable information, such as what type of document
this URL points to, what type of character encoding
and language is being used on the page, a suggested
date for when a search engine should come back to
the site and take another look, a description of the
site to be shown when the site comes up in a search
engine, a list of keywords a searcher may enter into
a search engine, and more.
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