| I've written about META tags in the past, and I thought | | | | while the third should be the creator or the creator's |
| I'd help you expand your search engine optimization | | | | web address. |
| efforts and increase your web hits. | | | | For visiting robots, you may want to add this line: |
| Rule #1: META tags always go in between the HEAD | | | | Although most robots use the robots.txt file, Google in |
| tags on your website. | | | | particular also pays attention to the third item - |
| Rule #2: NEVER include any line breaks in any META | | | | noarchive. This tells the search engine to index the |
| tag! | | | | page, but not to cache it. This comes in handy if you |
| Most everyone knows the two basic META tags: | | | | change your page often. Google will then always send |
| keywords and description. | | | | the user to the latest version of the page, not one that |
| Keywords should be in a descending order of | | | | it cached. |
| importance. Move your most important keywords to | | | | Latly, you may want to consider these two META |
| the front, and don't repeat yourself (e.g. auto,parts,auto | | | | tags for our wonderful Microsoft-controlled world: |
| parts,Auto Parts). Keep the list short, to about 25 | | | | The first turns off a feature in MS Internet Explorer |
| keywords. If you cater to more than one ethnic group | | | | which displays "smart tags", or dynamic links, to your |
| of people, consider keywords in other languages. | | | | website. These links can actually send the user to your |
| Lastly, eliminate spaces between the words. Make | | | | competition's website. Not good! |
| them "comma" instead of "comma space". | | | | The imagetoolbar tag prevents Internet Explorer 6+ |
| Descriptions should also be kept short and to the point. | | | | users from swiping your custom-made graphics by |
| Around 100-125 characters is about the max usable | | | | disabling a toolbar. This toolbar is usually displayed by |
| length. Make sure you use a few important keywords | | | | doing a right-click on a graphic and saving it to disk. |
| in your description, be informative but brief. | | | | While people can still swipe your graphics, at least |
| Web designers should include these tags as well: | | | | they'll have to go through a little trouble to get it. |
| These three tags may change if you are the owner of | | | | Hopefully its enough of a deterrant to keep them |
| the company/website but not the creator. In that case, | | | | away. |
| the first two lines would be about the company owner, | | | | |