Meta tags and their uses

Jeff Andersen (Other / Beginner)

Meta tags can be great for a website's interaction with search engines. Each website, unless specified is crawled by what are called spiders, or bots. These bots crawl your website picking up key words within your content as well as various other details such as description of site, title author etc etc.

This is generally a large task if a site has no meta tags and will in some cases be overlooked due to this. A website with meta tags basically consolidates all a search engine might want to know into one spot to make it easy when they show up to crawl your webpage.

When i apply meta tags i try to always include the following meta tags:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
<meta name="keywords" content="Keywords,separated,by,commas">
<meta name="description" content="Description of website here">
<meta name="author" content="Name Here">
<meta name="copyright" content="Copyright Sitename, All Rights Reserved">
<meta name="robots" content="all">
The first meta tag is describing the character set, this will vary from region to region & site to site. The second outlines the keywords for the website, separated by commas. Thirdly we have the description of the website, pretty straight forward, try to keep it fairly short ie. don't go on forever. Following that is the site author's name, this will not be shown in the search engine but identifys your code if looked at via view source. Second last we have a copyright statement, again this is like the author field, it will not be shown unless the source is viewed. The last meta tag is used to basically enable or disable bots/spiders from crawling your site, all means that it will index your website and will follow links through the site. Here are the further configurations: content="index,follow" content="noindex,follow" content="index,nofollow" content="noindex,nofollow". The follow statement is for the spider/bot to follow links within the page, and the index statement is to index the site on the search engine if accepted.

There are further meta tags than the ones i have mentioned, such as the redirect meta tag. This meta tag is generally not used because there are more efficient ways of redirecting a user such as javascript or php.

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