hiya everyone...

i dont no what the **** i am doing when it comes to meta tags so someones pwease help meeeeeeeeee by telling me how to use them to there maximum effect...!!!! ^-^

xx thanks in advance for any replies...

for what ?

for my website but... i want to no what each attribute does and you recomend i should put in...

the site name will probz be DarkHaven (not sure though) and ill type up the key words later on tonight...

Originally Posted by -_darkranger_-

for my website

lol

anyway:

<META name="description" content="a description of your page">
<META name="keywords" content="a, list, of, keywords">

these two are of most importance when aiming at a high rank in search engines.

Try a google search over "meta tags". There's like a gazillion pages about that. For example:
this site.
If you have furhter questions, do not hesitate to ask.

Regards.

Originally Posted by danburzo

lol

anyway:

<META name="description" content="a description of your page">
<META name="keywords" content="a, list, of, keywords">

these two are of most importance when aiming at a high rank in search engines.

Try a google search over "meta tags". There's like a gazillion pages about that. For example:
this site.
If you have furhter questions, do not hesitate to ask.

Regards.

w00t thanks *bows* hehe

Originally Posted by -_darkranger_-

w00t thanks *bows* hehe

i'm feeling a bit of sarcasm here, ey?

Originally Posted by danburzo

i'm feeling a bit of sarcasm here, ey?

no!!! im just hyper... sorry

actually meta tags are utterly useless for SE rankings. None of the major SEs use the meta content for ranking pages at all. They may read them but don't expect anything else.

Not really into SEs

sorry daburzo for seeming sarcastic but i wasnt being sarcastic... anyway how do i get the SEs to pick up my site then...

No problem.

So, to start with:
1. Have a title for the page, relevant for your site. Take the webmaster-talk.com for example, the title says :
Webmaster-talk.com Webmaster Forum - Web Design, PHP, SEO, Hosting, Graphics and More -ok maybe this is a little bit spammy, but it's ok.

2. Include a description and a keywords meta tag. Provide a short description of your site and some keywords (keep in mind search engines nowadays don't really rely on these, but it does help to have them)

3. Have the alt attribute on your images.

4. Have rich content (text) on your pages, possibly tossing in some keywords

more info here:
http://www.submit-it.com/subopt.htm

You can also put this in your site (there are lots of meta-tags attributed..but these are the basic ones)

<title>Your title here</title>
<meta name="description" content="your description here">
<meta name="keywords" content="your keywords here">
<META name="distribution" content="Global">
<META name="author" content="your/company name here">
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">

and get backlinks.

Originally Posted by chrishirst

actually meta tags are utterly useless for SE rankings. None of the major SEs use the meta content for ranking pages at all. They may read them but don't expect anything else.

Some of the smaller search engines still use meta tags. I still believe that they may be able to help, to a very small effect. It is another use of the keywords that you are targetting.
Surely Google will rank a site which has keywords in anchor text, title, within text, alt tags and also meta tags will be better than without meta tags. Or have Google made a formal annoucement that they no longer look at meta tags?

While I would agree with chrishirst that links are the best way to get search engine rankings, I would recommend adding these two metatags to your sites to help search engines reference your pages:

<meta name="robots" content="index,follow"/>
<meta name="revisit-after" content="30 days"/>

The first will reference your site and the second will tell bots to revisit the site after a month for new info.

Kaiman

Website Design and Graphics - Glenwood Springs, CO

The robots meta tag is an exclusion protocol and as "index,follow" is the normal behaviour of crawlers it won't make an iota of difference. If you have a page that you do not want indexing then use it by all means options are;
index | noindex , follow | nofollow
MSN and Google have their own version (<meta name="msnbot" ...>) (<meta name="googlebot" ...>) as well

The revisit-after is not used, and has never been used by any Internet Search Engine at all and probably never will be. It was used by Vancouver Webpages for their own crawler.
The same people developed the VW96 meta tags which used to get used by many so-called SEOs as well.
and BTW if they did follow it you would be telling the bot NOT to return for 30 days.

SE crawlers will visit at their own schedules. You cannot actually change that directly. It does appear though (from observation) that the Yahoo and MSN crawl schedules are both influenced by content expiry and Google uses a combination of external link count and content expiry for it's schedule.