Place of design

All about META tags
We hope these pages will demystify SEO, which is not a black art. META information just is a way of you telling the search engines what to do, and what not to do, enabling them to pass relevant content to the end user

Here is an example of using META tags
Feel free to cut copy paste these, but refer to the explanation below of what each tag means before altering anything. You can use all of these META tags at once. There are tricks for getting NetObjects, Dreamweaver and Front page to insert these into each page automatically. If anyone wants to know how to do this, let me know. Smart people alter the description, title and keywords tags between each page of their websites – in that way – you are not spamming the search engine, but you are maximising your exposure to any search phrase. Search engines usually rate your site PAGE BY PAGE. Some of the tags below you shouldn’t use… so read the write up before inserting the whole block

Example of a META TAG block:

<META http-equiv=”PICS-Label” content=’(PICS-1.1 http://www.rsac.org/ratingsv01.html” l gen false comment “RSACi North America Server” for “http://www.bwp-by-rk.co.uk” on “2006.11.06T23:37-0800″ r (n 0 s 0 v 0 l 0))’>
<META http-equiv=”PICS-Label” content=’(PICS-1.1 “http://www.classify.org/safesurf/” L gen true for “http://www.bwp-by-rk.co.uk” r (SS~~000 1))’>
<META name rating CONTENT =” Safe for kids”>
<META name expires CONTENT =”Mon, 01 Aug 2000 09:00:00 GMT”>
<META http-equiv pragma CONTENT =”no-cache”>
<META HTTP-EQUIV=”refresh” content=”5000;URL=http://www.bwp-by-rk.co.uk/”>
<META name keywords CONTENT =”photographer, wedding, Nottingham, picture, wedding photographer, etc…”>
<META name MSSmartTagsPreventParsing content=”TRUE”>
<META name owner CONTENT =”Richard King”>
<META name reply-to CONTENT =”richardking@bwp-by-rk.co.uk (Richard King)”>
<META name resource-type CONTENT =”document”>
<META http-equiv content-language CONTENT =”content=”en-uk”>
<META name abstract CONTENT =”Burton Joyce’s local wedding photographer – Richard King”>
<META name author CONTENT =”Richard King, Nott’s PC Services”>
<META name classification CONTENT =”Photography”>
<META name copyright CONTENT =”2006 (c) Richard King”>
<META name description CONTENT =”Beautiful Wedding Photography by Richard King. Based in Nottingham I take images of your wedding to keep for years”>
<TITLE CONTENT =” Beautiful Wedding Photography by Richard King – “>
<META name distribution CONTENT =”Global”>
<META name doc-class CONTENT =”Completed”>
<META http-equiv expires CONTENT =”Wed, 09 Aug 2010 09:00:00 GMT”>
<META name googlebot CONTENT =”Index, follow”>
<META name robots CONTENT =”index, follow”>
<META name revisit-after CONTENT =”30 days”>

So what does it all mean? Here is a blow by blow definition of each line of code:

Safety / rating info META TAGS

These tags define how your site will be rated by both search engines and content filters. Important…Visit the following websites for more info. The sites below generate the correct code for your site on the fly

General information: http://www.w3.org/pics
RSAC: http://www.RSAC.org
Safe Surfing: http://www.safesurf.com
WEBURBIA: http://www.weburbia.com/safe
Example tags:

<META http-equiv=”PICS-Label” content=’(PICS-1.1 http://www.rsac.org/ratingsv01.html” l gen false comment “RSACi North America Server” for “http://www.bwp-by-rk.co.uk” on “2006.11.06T23:37-0800″ r (n 0 s 0 v 0 l 0))’> Options: see note above – visit the site

<META http-equiv=”PICS-Label” content=’(PICS-1.1 “http://www.classify.org/safesurf/” L gen true for “http://www.bwp-by-rk.co.uk” r (SS~~000 1))’> Options: see note above – visit the site
<META name rating CONTENT =” Safe for kids”> Options: 14 Years / General / Mature / Restricted / Safe for Kids

Alter the end users browser behaviour
<META name expires CONTENT =”Mon, 01 Aug 2000 08:21:53 GMT”> This will cause a document to be reloaded from the website after the date (even if it is stored in the user’s cache). Put a date in the past to disable caching of the document.

<META http-equiv pragma CONTENT =”no-cache”> Stops the local browsers to not locally cache the web page

<META HTTP-EQUIV=”refresh” content=”5000;URL=http://www.bwp-by-rk.co.uk/”> Tells the local browser how many seconds to cache the local web page, after that time, the user will reload the page from your site, rather than use the local cached version)

Information about the web page
Some of these: the website owner (for example) seem unnecessary, but are used to populate fields on some directory search engines (like YELL, Thompson)

<META name keywords CONTENT =”your, keywords, separated, by, commas, goes, here”> Further info about this will be in my next post

<META name MSSmartTagsPreventParsing content=”TRUE”> If you don’t want Microsoft products to automatically generate smart tags on your web pages, include this tag. It must be included on each page of your site for which you do not desire this feature. It has no effect on smart tags, which you insert yourself.

<META name owner CONTENT =”Richard King”> The website owner

<META name reply-to CONTENT =”richardking@bwp-by-rk.co.uk (Richard King)”> Gives a contact email, and name for reply for the web page (could open you up to SPAM

<META name resource-type CONTENT =”document”> Explains what type of resource the page is (redundant now)

<META http-equiv content-language CONTENT =”content=”en-uk”> Defines the language of the page

<META name abstract CONTENT =”your text here”> Replace “your text here” with a description of your site. This description is often used as an alternate description on search engines

<META name author CONTENT =”Richard King, Place of design”> Details who wrote the site

<META name classification CONTENT =”Photography, Wedding”> defines the classification (on a search engine) as “photographer” and “wedding”

<META name copyright CONTENT =”2006 (c) Richard King”> Copyright statement

<META name description CONTENT =”A brief description of your site goes here”> This description is used as the main description on some search engines (what the punters read. You need to be clever here with the words you use, but it must be readable

<TITLE CONTENT =”Title of your page goes here”> I will discuss the content In my next post

<META name distribution CONTENT =”Global”> “Global” Appropriate for web access. “Local” Web servers will not pass a “Local” document to the web. “IU” Internal use – Intranets.

<META name doc-class CONTENT =”Completed”> Completed/Draft/Living Document/Published describes the current state of the document

How / when a page is indexed
<META http-equiv expires CONTENT =”Wed, 09 Aug 2006 09:21:17 GMT”> – tells the search engine when a page is no longer to be listed (useful for a promotional page)

<META name googlebot CONTENT =”Index”>Defines how the Googlebot spider indexes your site. By default, Google will attempt to spider every page you have on your site. Sometimes you will not want this to happen – you might have a series of pages that must be viewed from page 1, then 2, and 3 – in sequence. Using this tag can prevent the engine listing page 2 separately (stopping customers jumping in at page 2). You can use the ROBOTS metatag to control how all spiders index your site. The GOOGLEBOT Metatag controls exactly which pages Google indexes.

Options: all / index, follow / noindex, follow / index,nofollow / nosnippet /noarchive /none

all: Same as index,follow.
index,follow: The default, meaning index the page and follow all links from the page.
noindex,follow Don’t index the page but do follow all links from the page.
index,nofollow Index the page, but do not proceed to the links from the page.
noindex,nofollow Do not index the page and do not proceed to links from the page.
none Same as noindex,nofollow.

nosnippet From Google help:
“A snippet is a text excerpt from the returned result page that has all query terms bolded. The excerpt allows users to see the context in which search terms appear on a web page, before clicking on the result. Users are more likely to click on a search result if it has a corresponding snippet.” This value of NOSNIPPET removes the text snippet.

noarchive From Google help:
“Google keeps the text of the many documents it crawls available in a cache. This allows an archived, or “cached”, version of a web page to be retrieved for your end users if the original page is ever unavailable (due to temporary failure of the page’s web server). The cached page appears to users exactly as it looked when Google last crawled it. The cached page also includes a message (at the top of the page) to indicate that it’s a cached version of the page.”
“If you want to prevent all robots from archiving content on your site, use the NOARCHIVE meta tag.”

<META name robots CONTENT =”index, follow”> same as the googlebot tag above, with 1 exception… noimageindex (Altavista only) Prevents the images on the page from being indexed, but the text on the page can still be indexed

<META name revisit-after CONTENT =”30 days”> Tells the search engine to visit back after Xdays, and re-spider the site

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