All about META Tags - Part 1

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In these articles I'll try to explain all there is to know about
META tags and their important role in any website.  

META tags are extremely useful for your site as they help it get
listed in search engines, identify the creator of the page, what
HTML specs the site has, etc etc etc. Meta tags can even help to
avoid the page that has it being framed! These were just few
examples of the wide range of uses meta tags can have. Their
information most common uses are: by browsers to display the
site correctly; and by search engines spiders to better list
your site in their index. Read more to get to know them better
one by one, how to use them and in what search engines they are
recognized. 

Where to put the META Tags? 

Meta tags are always inserted within the  
container. To get a better perspective how it is done you can
check the source code of any given web site! Usualy you can do
this by right clicking your mouse on the site and chose "View
Source Code". 

Categories of META tags 

You'll find two kinds of META tags available for use! The
HTTP-EQUIV and the normal (usual) META tags. 

Let's start with the nomal ones and let the HTTP-EQUIV for
later! Within the regular META tags let's start with the most
importat ones for Search Engines indexing... the ones that are
considered the vital ones in order to achieve better results and
better rankings.  

- Description Tag 

Syntax:  

This tag is used to provide search engines with a description of
the page they are indexing. If you analyse the results of any
search at Google or Yahoo you'll notice that there's the title
of the page in bold and a small description below! The title of
the page is take from the  tag and the description is
taken from this META tag! This tag is on the top 3 most
important for a site as it will assist search engine's robots to
better index you. They'll just put in their index any sentence
you write for that specific page. If you don't have this tag
present on the page the robot will use the text from the first
paragraph of the text within the body area of the page. It's
recommended that you use less than 144 characters for this tag
tho Google and other major search engines only use about 60-80
to display! 

- Keywords Tag 

Syntax:  

First of, Google don't use this tag for indexing... but Yahoo
and more engines do! This tag is used for you to make the spider
know the words that logically best describe your site and the
content of the page! You can use a single word or a small phrase
with 3 or 4 words separeted by commas (avoid using "and", "for",
"or"... these are known as stop words). The lengh of this meta
tag can vary but it's advisable by many Search Engine
Optimisation experts that this tag has less than 1024
characters, with no word repeated more than 7 times. Also it's
recommended that the keywords are listed by order of
importance. 

- Distribution Tag 

Syntax:  

This tag specifies how the document using it shall be index.
"global" is a normal indexing directive that allows the document
to be index by the major internet search engines. If you want to
avoid this indexing just change the word "global" to "local" and
the document will only be indexed by an intranet indexing
engine. 

  

These three (plus the title tag of your site) are the ones you
need to be an expert at in order to get great results. Managing
the keywords present in each of this tags gets you higher and
higher on Search Engines Positioning and therefore lots and lots
of visitor. 

In the 2nd part of this article I'll explain all other tags that
are not that important to Search Engines but sometimes useful
for controling the performance of your site when being displayed
to your precious visitors.  

I sincerely hope that you find this article useful to you and
also that you feel ready to do that upgrade needed in your site!
For more articles please check our webmaster's resources and
templates site at http://www.wise-designs.com