Webmaster Knowledge Base | "METATAGS" | Back to overview


The so called METATAGS are hidden informations inside the "head" section of your website that are usefull for searchengine indexing. Once you have submitted your site to the major searchengines, most of them look first to the METATAGS to collect informations about your site and display it as search results.

For your own individual METATAGS you can use our METATAG CODER which generates the needed METATAGS automatically and prepare them for simple "copy & paste" into your website.

Placement :

META tags should be placed in the head of the HTML document between the actual <HEAD> tags and before the <BODY> tag. This is also very important with framed pages.

Introducing the most important METATAGS :

"Title"

Well, ok this is not METATAG but one of the most important parts : A good Webpage title explains the content of your site ( using the "TOP 5" ). Every single page of your website should have a unique title, using keywords and explaining the content.

Limitations :

  • 60 - 80 characters lenght ( incl. spaces )

<TITLE>your website`s title which is informative and contains some keywords</TITLE>

"Description"

Take some time for your description tag. The intent is that this text will be used by the searchengines when printing a summary of your document. Don`t forget that very often the description is displayed by the searchengines to describe search results. It have to be informativ and usefull for the searchengine users .

<META NAME="description" CONTENT="describe your website here and don`t forget to use some keywords .">


Limitations :

  • 200 characters lenght ( incl. spaces ) , try to use not more than 20 words. No keyword over-usement ( not more than one keyword 2 times inside this tag )

"Keywords"

If a searchengine request matches the keywords on your page you have a good chance to get your site listed.


<META NAME ="keywords" CONTENT="your, keywords, the, top, 5 comes, first, here">

Limitiations :

  • allowed is a maximum of 2000 characters, but best is to use
    15 - 25 keywords ( TOP 5 first )
  • don`t repeat the same keyword more than 3 times


"Author"

Put your name in here.


<META NAME="Author" CONTENT="Your Name">

"Language"

This tag is used to declare the natural language of the page. It is used by robots to categorize your site by language. English is specified in the following example.


<meta http-equiv="content-language" content="english,en">

"Robots"

With that tag you can tell the searchengine robots how to index your site. Can be also combined with a so called "robots.txt", I will explain later.


<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="all | none | index | noindex | follow | nofollow">


The default for the robot attribute is "all". This allows all of the files to be indexed by the spider. "None" tells the spider not to index any files, and not to follow the hyperlinks to the other pages. "Index" indicates that this page may be indexed by the spider. "Follow" means the spider is free to follow the links from this page to other pages. "Nofollow" allows the page to be indexed, but links are not followed. The opposite is also true. This META tag would tell the spider not to index this page, but it would follow subsidiary links and index those pages.


<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="noindex">

"Type"

Type of information that is provided on your web page. The most common types are "Home Page", "Advertisement", "Description", "Entertainment", "General", "News", "Personal", "Technical", and "User Manual".


<META name="type" content="Home Page">

"Expires"

This tells the browser the date and time when the document will be considered "expired." If a user is using Netscape Navigator, a request for a document whose time has "expired" will initiate a new network request for the document. An illegal Expires date such as "0" is interpreted by the browser as "immediately." Robots may delete expired documents from a search engine, or schedule a revisit. Dates must be in the RFC850 format, (GMT format):


<META HTTP-EQUIV="expires" CONTENT="Wed, 26 Aug 1998 08:21:57 GMT">

If your page expires never, use the following tag :


<META HTTP-EQUIV="expires" CONTENT="NEVER">

"Copyright"

Copyright statement.


<META NAME="copyright" CONTENT="insert copyright statement here.">

"Revisit"

Tells the searchengine robots when to revisit your site and index maybe new pages or content. Searchengine spiders are very busy small cyborgs, not all of them take care for this tag and revisit your site as they want...

<META NAME="revisit-after" CONTENT="7 days">

"Reply"

To prevent spam submissions some searchengines want to see the webmaster`s mailadress. But : if you can, use not your standard adress - the searchengines want to block spam on their own sites but love to send you advertisements.....

<META HTTP-EQUIV="Reply-to" CONTENT="your@mailadress.com">

 

Hierarchy of METATAGS inside your sourcecode :

  1. Title
  2. Description
  3. Keywords

..the rest as you like it.

 

HINT : Use our METATAG CODER to set up your own METATAGS !