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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.
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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