Home > Copyright Trademark Patent > Meta Tags Unravelled

Meta Tags Unravelled

October 3rd, 2011

Meta tags initial appeared and where employed in internet designs in the 1990s. Meta tags where initially created in order to make sense of the growing number of internet pages listed on search engines. Even so the popularity of Meta tags rapidly began to shrink. The reason? Unethical webmasters. Some of the far more unscrupulous webmasters began abusing the keyword Meta Tag, overloading this tag with unrelated and sometimes immoral keywords, for example someone operating a pornographic internet site would enter key phrases unrelated to their industry in order for their website to appear for totally unrelated searches, this in particular caused outrage when juvenile and underage young children where exposed to adult material when searching for totally unrelated subjects.


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Naturally this was wrong and one by one, the major search engines discontinued the use of Meta tags as part of their major web site indexing criteria. Google disregarded Meta tags altogether, however a number of search engines that still read Meta tags, giving some weight to the argument that they play a part in the placement of your internet site within search engines, (Google will still look at your description tag).

There are still a couple of Meta tags that add value to your website, and I think they are still worth spending a little quantity of time on to get proper.  The Meta tags that are worth finding correct I will describe in detail in this write-up, nevertheless in brief some of the a lot more worthwhile tags that are of use and can prove to be good for site organisation are

Meta Content Kind – Declares the character set, Usually use this tag along with the DTD declaration format from the World Wide Web Consortium. Failure to do so could trigger display issues. For example, this tag helps appropriately display the page.

Meta Author Tag – declares the author of the webpage or web site, this tag is optional. This tag can be of use to track the content author for the site, particularly if there is far more than 1 web author. This tag has no bearing for your search engine ranking, but it is recognized as a “standard” Meta Tag.

Meta Copyright – To incorporate copyright, trademark, patent or other data pertaining to intellectual property (shouldn’t use this instead of a copyright notice that is visible on the Web page)

Meta Content Language – Utilised to declare the language of the document.

Meta Description – Gives a description of the web page that appears under the title of the ‘serps’ (search engine results page) for your website. This tag consists of a short, plain language description of the document, normally 20-25 words or much less, anymore and the crawler generating its way via your website will stop indexing the tag.

Meta Key phrases- Many internet site owners or web designers tend to leave this tag out these days believing it to have no relevance to page rank or search engine listing. Nevertheless I think this tag still has some relevance no matter how little.

The following Meta tags supply info to the web server, internet crawlers or robots and internet browsers that visit web site or web page – the browsers and servers can take action based on the Meta tags and content within.

Meta cache-control - Control how your pages are cached. The alternatives you have are: public  – makes it possible for the page to be cached private – the page may possibly only be cached in private caches no-cache – the page ought to by no means be cached no-store – the page might be cached but not archived.

 

Meta expires – If the content of your page has an expiration date, you can specify this in your meta information. This is most often used by servers and browsers that cache content. If the content is expired, they will load the page from the server rather than the cache.

 

Meta Pragma No Cache – Developed and used to stop visitors from seeing a cached version of a distinct page. This tag forces the browser to pull information from the server each and every time the page is viewed.

Meta robots – Developed to control search engine robots on a per-page basis. This tag tells the Web robots whether they are allowed to index and archive this Web page. You can contain any or all of the following keywords to control what the robots do. The robots can do anything on the page none – robots can do nothing index – robots really should consist of this page in the index noindex – robots should not include this page in the index follow – robots really should follow the links on this page nofollow – robots really should not follow links on this page.

 

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