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Welcome to Marketing
4
money
A free resource dedicated to
the serious
online marketer
by
CKasso
How, why and when to use Meta Tags
A meta tag is a bit
of information that goes into the HTML of your webpage. It is meant only for
the search engines to see and does not have any effect on the way your site
behaves or appears to the human eye.
I will start by
saying that meta tags are not required and not all search engines use them.
However, some do. The good news is, you can include them in all your pages
simply because the engines that do not use them will simply ignore them, and
the ones that do use them will be happy.
This is a bit
controversial as I know webmasters that do not use meta tags and I know others
that swear by them.
Me? Personally I use
them in all my pages to be on the safe side. I have done some experimenting on
pages without them and I cannot say that I have conclusive evidence either
way, so... it's up to you.
A meta tag is used
to give more specific information about your site to the search engines.
Hopefully making their decision to list your site in their indexes easier and
more relevant. The meta tags I have used on this page look like this:
<html>
<head>
<meta
name="Description" CONTENT="Welcome to Marketing 4 Money! A free resource for
internet marketers. Learn how to use meta tags.">
<meta name="Keywords" CONTENT="Here I put my keywords">
<meta name="Subject" CONTENT="Here I
put the subject of my site for example: marketing">
<meta name="Revisit-after" CONTENT="This
tag tells the spiders how often to visit for example: 10 days">
<meta name="Rating" CONTENT="This
tells the spiders what the rating of my site is for example: general, adult,
children etc">
<meta name="robots" content="This
tells them what to do when they get here: index,follow,all">
The next two tags have to do with unscrupulous webmasters (to be honest I'm
not sure what they do, but my programmer friends tell me they protect my pages
from hackers? So, I put'em in...)
<meta http-equiv="imagetoolbar" content="no">
<meta name="MSSmartTagsPreventParsing" content="TRUE">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="Tells
the spiders what language your site is in: en-us">
These three tags let the spiders know what different style and document types
might be included on your pages.
<meta http-equiv="Content-Script-Type" content="text/javascript">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Style-Type" content="text/css">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
</head>
<body>
This is where the content of your site would go.
</body>
</html>
There are other meta tags that you can use, and you
don't have to use all the ones above. These are the ones that I use in all my
pages and they seem to work fine for me. Mind you I have tried many other
variations and always come back to this configuration.
When using FrontPage or an html editor to create your
web pages, they will automatically insert some tags into the html. I strip
those out and replace them with the ones above.
The tags below are required for all pages in your site and are very important.
That is why I included them in the meta tag description above. Basically they
outline the structure of your entire site and many html attributes would not
work or display properly without them :
<html>
<head>
Meta tags go here
</head>
<body>
your sites content goes here
</body>
</html>
If you would like to
take a look at the actual code used to create this page, you can! Simply click
on the "View" button at the top of your browser and then click on "source". A
text document will open with the html code of this page.
You will not be able
to alter it because it is password protected. But you can do this to any page
on the web to get a few ideas and tricks.
I hope you
will use this information for learning purposes only, and not as others have
to copy and take advantage of.
This is a great way
to see how different webmasters are using html, and what keywords they are
targeting.
Good Luck in this Marketing Jungle!
CKasso |
