Using the Meta tag

Meta tags are really important because they are picked up by meta crawlers by search engines like google or yahoo. There are really easy to use to use. All the meta tags go into to head of your page.

There are a couple different meta tags.

Keywords: These are words that help web searchers find your site based on what you site is about. For example, if you have a site that sells sports equipment, then you would put word like: Sports, baseballs, basketballs, sportswear, sporting goods and so on.

Code:

<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="Keywords go here">

Description: This is exactly what you think it is. Put a brief description of your site here.

Code:

<META NAME="description" CONTENT="Your description">

Author: this gives credit to the author.

Code:

<META NAME="author" CONTENT="You Name">

Expiration date: This put an expiration date on your page. Use it if necessary.

Code:

<META HTTP-EQUIV="Expires" CONTENT="PagesExperationDate">

Robots: Don't worry, its not the blood thirsty killer robots from the terminator. I'm talking the robots that go out and search the internet and index pages for there search engine. This meta tag gives you the ability to stop the meta crawlers from indexing you site. The attribute "none" tells the robot to just ignore the whole site. I guess the only reason to do that is if you had a private page that you don't want anyone to find. The attribute "index" and "all" means that robots are welcome to include this page in search services. The attribute "follow" allows the page to be indexed, but robots are welcome to follow links from this page to find other pages. The attribute "noindex" allows the subsidiary links to be explored, even though the page is not indexed.The attribute "nofollow" allows the page to be indexed, but no links from the page are explored. By default it is set to "all".

Code:

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="ALL | NONE | NOINDEX | NOFOLLOW">

Refresh: This gives you the ability to redirect or refresh the browser. The content is the number of seconds you want the browser to wait till it refreshes. Url is the address you want the browser to go to.

Code:

<META HTTP-EQUIV="refresh" content="0; url=homepage.html">