Meta tags first appeared and where used in web design in the 1990s. Meta tags where initially created in order to make sense of the increasing number of web pages listed on search engines. However the popularity of Meta tags quickly began to shrink. The reason? Unethical webmasters.
Some of the more unscrupulous webmasters began abusing the keyword Meta Tag, overloading this tag with unrelated and sometimes immoral keywords, for example someone operating a pornographic website would enter keywords unrelated to their industry in order for their site to appear for totally unrelated searches, this in particular caused outrage when juvenile and underage children where exposed to adult material when searching for totally unrelated subjects.
Obviously this was wrong and one by one, the major search engines discontinued the use of Meta tags as part of their main website indexing criteria. Google disregarded Meta tags altogether, however several search engines that still read Meta tags, giving some weight to the argument that they play a part in the placement of your website within search engines, (Google will still look at your description tag).
There are still a few Meta tags that add value to your website, and I believe they are still worth spending a small amount of time on to get right. The Meta tags that are worth getting correct I will describe in detail in this article, however in brief some of the more worthwhile tags that are of use and can prove to be good for website organisation are;
Meta Content Type - Declares the character set, Always use this tag along with the DTD declaration format from the World Wide Web Consortium. Failure to do so may cause display problems. For example, this tag helps properly display the page.
Meta Author Tag - declares the author of the webpage or website, this tag is optional. This tag can be of use to track the content author for the website, especially if there is more than one web author. This tag has no bearing for your search engine ranking, but it is known as a ystandardy Meta Tag.
Meta Copyright - To include copyright, trademark, patent or other information pertaining to intellectual property (shouldn't use this instead of a copyright notice that is visible on the Web page)
Meta Content Language y Used to declare the language of the document.
Meta Description y Gives a description of the web page that appears under the title of the yserpsy (search engine results page) for your website. This tag consists of a short, plain language description of the document, usually 20-25 words or less, anymore and the crawler making its way through your site will stop indexing the tag.
Meta Keywords- Many website owners or web designers tend to leave this tag out nowadays believing it to have no relevance to page rank or search engine listing. However I believe this tag still has some relevance no matter how small.
meta name="keywords" content="web design, website design, etc"
The following Meta tags provide information to the web server, web crawlers or robots and web 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 options you have are: public - allows the page to be cached; private - the page may only be cached in private caches; no-cache - the page should never be cached; no-store - the page may be cached but not archived.
Meta expires - If the content of your page has an expiration date, you can specify this in your meta data. 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 prevent visitors from seeing a cached version of a specific page. This tag forces the browser to pull information from the server each time the page is viewed.
Meta robots - Created 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 include 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 should include this page in the index; noindex - robots should not include this page in the index; follow - robots should follow the links on this page; nofollow - robots should not follow links on this page
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