MetaTags Defined by Discovery Computer Training	Visited: 3564 2.0/5.0 (3 votes total) Rate: Select 1 - Terrible 2 - Poor 3 - Average 4 - Good 5 - Outstanding
by Jonathan Gray September 15, 2003

Metatags are the codes in your website that the search engine spiders use to determine and categorize your website information.

Good metatags can greatly enhance your website ranking in the search engines.

Metatag example
< META NAME=" description" CONTENT="Metatags definitions and hints on better search engine placement. Links to free online metatag code generators. Free Scripts, Graphics makers, downloads and Online javascript and flash code generators ">

<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="metatag, robot txt, revisit after, meta tags, how to, what is, learn, information about, code generators, free online resources">
< META NAME="robot" CONTENT="index,follow">
< META NAME="copyright" CONTENT="Copyright © 2003 Discovery. All Rights Reserved.">
< META NAME="author" CONTENT="discovery computer training">
< META NAME="language" CONTENT="english">
< META NAME="revisit-after" CONTENT="30">

The two most important metatags are the description and keywords, No website should be without them.

In the Description include everything you want your visitors to know. This is the part that shows up in the search engines listing about your website. You should always include the most important information first because some search engines stop after 150 characters. It is generally suggested to keep this to about 150-200 characters.

Keywords are where you place your keywords and keyword phrases. Basically think of a few words that sum up your website. What would someone type into a search engine to find your website? Place the most important KEY words first and make sure you do use them in your webpage. Your keyword density is important because the search engines will judge the relevance of your website with these. Focus on making your keywords at least 100 characters in length up to about 200. Try to keep the words relevant to your website.

Use the robot tag if you have unfriendly content that you want the spider to skip. In the example above I have written index follow which tells the spider to continue with the entire page indexing all the links. No index follow tells the spider to not index the page but follow the links.

Copyright Author and Language are to help the spider categorize the website. Not really necessary to have depending on the search engines you are interested in.
Revisit after tells the search engine spider how soon it should return to reindex the site. On average 30 days is good this is dependant on how many timse you update your website. If you update more you should adjust this to match your updates.