Meta Tags:

In the Origin of Words the word Meta has a number of different meanings depending upon it's origin. In English Meta means that it is of it's own category, as in meta-memory meaning an individual's ability to recall knowledge. In the Greek language Meta, much like in Latin is closer in meaning to the English term post (as in after) and in Roman days Meta was a physical structure that was part of chariot races.

In cyber language it is used as a command or indicator. There are some that say meta tags don't mean much anymore to search engines other than the title, description and keywords. Then others say that meta tags are one of the most important aspects of your site. I fall into the later group of thinkers. Generally speaking you have the following tags on every page:

When a search engine spider hits your page one of the very first things it looks for are the meta tags. So as far as I'm concerned these are very important to get right for each page.

<title></title>
<META NAME="TITLE" CONTENT="">
<META name="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="">
<META name="KEYWORDS" CONTENT="">
<META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="">
<META HTTP-EQUIV="EXPIRES" CONTENT="">
<META HTTP-EQUIV="CONTENT-LANGUAGE" CONTENT="">
<META NAME="RATING" CONTENT="">
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="">
<META NAME="REVISIT-AFTER" CONTENT="">
<META name="DISTRIBUTION" CONTENT="">

Above you'll see the command CONTENT=""> after every META tag command. This is where you tell the spider about your site. You also, to a certain degree, have the ability to actually control what the spider will do while on your site. Getting into explaining all of the meta tag combinations of command usage is an article in and of itself. However I will show you an example and briefly explain what each command is doing. For more information on meta tags a good spot to go is: http://www.metatags.ca/

E.g.

<title>Auto Surf News! Main News Page</title>

The web site's page name. Note I said page name not web site name. It is important that the title changes for each page (see below).

<META NAME="TITLE" CONTENT="Auto Surf News! Main News Page">

Each page of your web site should have a different title. This is the main index page of a site named Auto Surf News. However in their About page the title is <title>Auto Surf News! About Page</title>

<META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">

Languages have different character sets in the world of computers. For the most part if your site is in English then the above command is the character set you would use. If your primary language is not English you can search the above command to find the proper character set or stop by at http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/charset.html

<META NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="Auto Surfing for Credits, Promotion and Traffic Growth. All the traffic you need right here! Only the best, global, hassle free systems.">

Some SEO specialists will tell you that the description of a site should not exceed 150 characters. Others feel that it makes no difference to search engines. Both are correct. Some engines have limits to description length and will normally truncate the wording and give you a slightly lower rank. Other search engines don't care. The description can be as long as you want it to be - they will display the length they want. The above is 136 characters in length. So what to do? Find a middle ground. If you're over 150 characters by a little it will make no difference, just don't write a novel length description in there.

<META NAME="KEYWORDS" CONTENT="autosurfs, auto surf, autosurf, autosurfing, traffic programs, free advertising, credit generators, traffic generators, surf, surfing, advertising, ultimate, collection, credit, free, news, information, directory">

What was said about "DESCRIPTION" length above applies with keywords as well. However there is a general consensus that you should never repeat the keyword more than three times otherwise search engines will lower your ranking as they believe you are trying to spam their spider.

<META NAME="OWNER" CONTENT="admin@autosurfnews.com">
<META NAME="AUTHOR" CONTENT="autosurf news staff">

The above two are simply reference meta tags used to identify contact and name information should it be needed.

<META HTTP-EQUIV="EXPIRES" CONTENT="never">

This tag should always be set to never expire unless you have a page(s) that are time sensitive such as a limited time sales page. This helps search engine avoid pages you are not using at the moment but may revive in the future. Instead of using the words never you could place the number of days here that will tell the spider when this page expires, such as CONTENT="14 days" from the date of page creation.

<META HTTP-EQUIV="CONTENT-LANGUAGE" CONTENT="English">

The above is self-explanatory. What language is your site written in?

<META NAME="RATING" CONTENT="General">

This meta tag tells the spider the type of audience you serve. General is usually the case however there are, as we all know, adult sites, over certain age sites, etc. and you would change the name appropriately.

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="index, follow">

This is an important order or command to the spider telling it what to do after dealing with this page. In the above example the spider is told to index the page in the search engine's database and make it publicly available. At the same time the spider is told to follow on to the next page of the site. There are combinations here that can be used simply by using nofollow and noindex. So you could have it followed but not indexed or you could have it indexed but not followed.

<META NAME="REVISIT-AFTER" CONTENT="4 weeks">

This simply tells the search engine spider when to come back to check for new content. In our example blog and forum above you would want this set to daily and the main site possibly set to 1 week or monthly (4 weeks).

Read Part 3 - Read Part 5