There are many times where you want to include information about a document
that is not actually part of the document itself. Such information is know as
meta data. The HEAD element of HTML provides a place to
provide this meta data, for example with the TITLE element for the
document's title and the STYLE element for the document's style
sheet.
There is also a way to include pretty much any meta data you like through the
use of the META element. Initially, the main use of the element was
to indicate things like an expiry date to the web server. Recently, the search
engine AltaVista has started making use of the element in it's indexing
of web pages.
The META element is empty which means it has no content and no
end-tag. Instead, the information is expressed in the attributes of the
start-tag. The tags generally come in the form: <META NAME=name-of-meta-data CONTENT="content of meta data">
So if you wanted to indicate the author of the document you could write: <HEAD>
...
<META NAME=author CONTENT="Mr. Jinngles">
...
</HEAD>
You can have as many different META tags as you like, one for
each bit of meta information you want to include with the document.
This meta tags gives the page a name to identify it on search engines, and in
your bookmarks or favourites list. The most common title is.....you guessed it,
No Title. Many sites use the companies business name in the meta tags which is
fine to get the site found on a search for Gianni Versace, but not if you
want to be found by new customers who are searching for generic products or
services. It is useful to include your favourite keywords in your title meta
tags, preferably at the start, as this carries lots of weight when it comes to
ranking a site with search engines.
Don't forget: The title tag is the first thing people will see
when they spot your page in the search results. Keep it short and appealing.
Make the title sell your site!
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A brief description of your website. It should be written with proper grammar
and proper punctuation. It should contain keywords from your webpage. It should
not contain hype statements or marketing language, like, this is the
"only", "best" or "greatest". Avoid "Welcome to". Do not use "!". It should be a
maximum of 150 characters.
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These meta tags are where you list those words or terms you want to be found
under. Try to keep the metat tags keyword list short and separate each word or
phrase with a comma. Consider using foreign language variations of your main
keywords to attract searches from non-English speaking clients. Do not repeat
keywords more than twice in the Keywords meta tags as this can be considered
spamming by some engines.
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You should use the Author tag. It defines who the author is and who is
responsible for updates. You can use the name, company name, email address of
the webmaster or Internet address (URL).
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For copyright identification purposes, this tag holds the copyright statement.
It can be the name of the copyright holder.
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Instructs the visitors cache to refresh after the number of days indicated in
the content value. This can be set to "0" if you update content regularily
and want each visitor to be presented with the freshiest content.
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Tells the search engines spider (robot) what pages to access and which pages to
not access on your website. The categories available are:
ALL
means that robots are welcome to include and follow all the
pages in the search services.
INDEX
means that robots are welcome to include this page in search
services.
FOLLOW means that robots are welcome to
follow links from this page to
find other
pages.
NOINDEX allows the subsidiary links to be explored,
even though the
page is not
indexed.
NOFOLLOW allows the page to be indexed, but no links
from the page are
explored.
NONE
tells the robot to ignore the page.
This tag includes the charset tag and is required by the W3C.
Example:
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
Commonly used character encodings
are:
ISO-8859-1 (also referred to as "Latin-1"; usable for
most Western European
languages)
ISO-8859-5 (which supports
Cyrillic)
SHIFT_JIS (a Japanese encoding)
EUC-JP
(another Japanese encoding)
UTF-8 (using a
different number of bytes for different characters)
Declares the language of the documents context.
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) | |
