Example:

<TITLE CONTENT =”Beautiful Wedding Photography by Richard King – Home Page”>

This is the page title, must be readable English, and appears in the browser tool bar, and as the website title. On search engines, using the above example “Beautiful Wedding Photography by Richard King – Home Page” is displayed as the “bit you click on” in some search engines. Goggle usually reads about 90 characters of this tag, so it is wise to set a character limit of 60, as the displayed part is often shorter. It is worth knowing that the search engines look at the content of this for relevancy (compared to the text on the page is on) and the content in terms of searching

In the example above the relevant keywords were: Beautiful Wedding Photography Richard King, Count = 5 across 1 page

It is completely OK to have different title tags on different pages – Example:

<TITLE CONTENT =”Beautiful Wedding Photography by Richard King – Home Page”>
<TITLE CONTENT =”Contact Richard King – Your local Nottingham wedding photographer”>
<TITLE CONTENT =”Stylish wedding picture galleries by bridal photographer Richard King”>

**Search engines will note the differences in the keywords used**
Relevant keywords  were: Beautiful Wedding Photography Richard King Contact local Nottingham bridal photographer Stylish picture galleries
Relevant keyword count: 13 across 3 pages

The phrase relevant keywords will come up a lot… basically, its really good news if those keywords are actually in the body text of the page, and between the <H>Heading</H> tags too

Description Tag

Example:

<META name description CONTENT =”I am a family wedding photographer based in Burton Joyce, on the Newark side of Nottingham. I provide reportage and traditional albums, available with black and white or colour images. Bridal portraiture is a speciality”>

Everything mentioned about the TITLE tag is relevant here, except the length should be more than 55 characters and less than 250 characters

Alt tags

Example:

<img src=”couplet’s” alt=”Newly wed bride and groom having confetti thrown all over them”>

These are the “alternative” tags offered by designers for browsers that do not display images. The text in these tags is read by search engines, and the actual words mused make a difference, and ought to reflect the content of the page. When you move your mouse over one of these tags, the text is often displayed, so it must be readable English length must be under 125 characters long

“longdesc” is a tag that ought to be used (instead of alt) if the length of descriptive text is over 125 characters (i.e. For long descriptive technical illustrations) the “longdesc” tag isn’t noticed by search engines

Keyword Tag

Example:

<META name keywords CONTENT =”photographer, wedding, Nottingham, picture, wedding photographer, etc…”>

Again – the keyword list is important, and it is also useful to include typo’s and miss-spellings (something I do naturally). It is quite a good idea to vary your keywords on all the different pages on the site. Again, the relevancy of the keywords chosen applies in the same way as in the title and description tags – The important keywords should be in the body text on the main page, and in the headlines too. It is quite acceptable to pop phrases in the keyword content too

The length of the content must be between 200 and 1055 characters

The best advice is go ask 10 people” what would you type into Goggle to find xxxxx” and use whatever they say as your keywords

Summary
Search engines read text, and without it you will not get a decent ranking, the text used in all the meta information, must reflect the text on the web page. Unfortunately photographers have sites with little text, and it will be noted that the websites that do well have lots of text on them

If you keep your META information within the limits allowed, search engines will love your site and give you a fighting chance of a ranking. If you add the META information in a logical and smart way, thinking about the content – this will improve the ranking further

Don’t shoot yourself in the foot
Search engines penalise:

• Posting your address on thier ADD URL web page to many times
• Lists of keywords in the text
• Blatant spamming of keywords (over use of 1 or 2 words)
• Hidden text (black or dark grey text on a black background for example)

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