Wut2's - How to use Meta Tags to improve your website

The meta tags in the header of a page are there to tell the browser and search engines something about the content of the page. Below we have samples of the most common tags that you will see will you view a page in html mode (View Source). The tabs are in bold/red and each one has a brief description.

<meta name="keywords" content="keywords, search engine positioning, good keywords, how people search, software, tools, for, selling, ecommerce, e-commerce, windows software, tools, web, promotion, traffic measurement, site popularity, pay per click search engines, link popularity internet, marketing, sales, windows, b2b, business to business, consumer, search engine, optimization">
As you can see the above "Keywords" tag list a number of words or phrases separated by commas, that allow the search engine to index or catalog a brief description on what may be discussed in the content of the page. This is advantageous as some search engines don't index the actual text in the pages but rely on the keywords as a primary source of information about the page.

<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en-us">
This one is fairly self explanatory, it indicates that the content is written in English and uses the United State form of words such as "harbor" as opposed to the British "harbour"

<meta name="Robots" content="index, follow">
This is an important one if you want the search engines to index and record this page and to follow the links that are displayed in the pages. Now this is a good way to have spider (search engine) crawl your entire site by placing links that lead from one page to the next. However if you have offsite links to other webs on the internet it will leave your site and begin index the linked site. See how to write a "robot Text file" ("robot.txt") as well.

The RobotsMeta tag may use the following options
Indexes the page and follows links
<meta name="robots" content="index, follow">

Does not index the page, but follows links
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow">

Indexes the page, but does not follow links
<meta name="robots" content="index, nofollow">

Neither indexes or follows links
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html/images; charset=windows-1252">
This line describes the kind of content likely to be found on the page. Some search engine have dedicated bots that search for a specific type of content such as images and catalog and offer you the choice of images which contain specific words in the name. This way you can type in "Katrina" to see images of hurricane Katrina's destruction and not have to read a lot of news releases about it. This search will also bring up picture of women with the name of Katrina as well. The last part of the tag line indicates what type of characters is in use. In this case it is Western European as opposed to something like Chinese. Below is a complete table of the characters. We have left them in text format so you can come here anytime you need a special character and highlight/copy and paste it in your own document. You may want to change the font size after you paste it. We have found this especially useful and use the degree ° symbol all the time. These are also available in some editors.

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[

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{

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€

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‡

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<meta name="GENERATOR" content="Microsoft FrontPage 4.0">
This just basically states which html editor and version that was used to create the page

<meta name="ProgId" content="FrontPage.Editor.Document">
Ditto same as above but no version shown

<title>wut2's About Us - Wut2 is an online community site for all activities</title>
Title this is normally the name you give it when saved but can be edited to make it more descriptive as many of the search engines show this line in the results.

<meta name="description" content="Find something to do, or share your experiences and photos.">
Virtually the same as the Keywords tag described above.

<meta name="Microsoft Border" content="tlb, default">
In this case the page was generated and border along the top, left-hand side, and bottom were automatically attached to it. The default in our site is to apply it to all pages but individual pages can (such as our Forums) can be selected to not have the borders applied by right clicking on the page and selecting "shared borders" then un-checking the borders and selecting "this page only"