Promote: Web Page Header Template Instructions
Search Engine Preparation
META tags are an invaluable tool to getting your web pages indexed by search engines. Make the best use of a search by providing specific information about your site.
Example of a completed document head:
This example shows what the Quick META Tag Generator produces.
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<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html lang="en"><head> <title>PAGE_NAME, SITE_NAME</title> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"> <meta name="keywords" content="PAGE_KEY_WORDS"> <meta name="description" content="PAGE_DESCRIPTION"> <meta name="author" content="WEB_EDITOR"> <meta name="copyright" content="OWNER_NAME"> <meta name="rating" content="general"> <meta name="robots" content="all"> </head> |
Bold text indicates what gets replaced with the information you provide.
Document Head Element Definitions
DOCTYPE:
Declares the encoding type and compatibility level of your pages. For standard HTML pages this is generally appropriate. However, if you will be using some of the new HTML, XHTML, or XML standards then you should modify this line to indicate your intent. For more information on this subject, visit the the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) site.
TITLE:
Be sure that you do not forget to put the title of the page in your new header. Please remember to add the site and company name to the end of the title, too. This may make your title a bit long at times, but when the page is indexed it makes it obvious where the content originates. If the name does get too long, then the site and company name will get truncated rather than your page title.
Suggested META Tags
Below is a list of common META tags used in web documents. The tags marked with an asterisk (*) are required for every document produced. Those required tags are: content-type, robots, copyright, and rating.
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Document Language
- * This is the specification of the character set to use for this page. If you are providing content using an international font set, then you should specify the appropriate character set to use, otherwise leave this line as-is for an English character set.
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
- Natural language of the document helps. This tag is used by many European search engines for indexing content. Uses language name and two letter abbreviation.
<meta name="language" content="English, en">
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Search engine details:
- * Robots allows you to control what search engines will or will not index when they search your content. You control what information will be indexed with the following options (note: the commas ARE necessary and spaces are not allowed):
<meta name="robots" content="ALL">
- ALL - index this page and follow its links.
- NONE - do not index this page, do not follow its links.
- INDEX,NOFOLLOW - index this page, but do not follow its links.
- NOINDEX,FOLLOW - do not index this page, but do follow its links.
- NOARCHIVE - do not index this page in a web archive.
- Define the specified minimum interval that crawlers may re-index the page, and should be specified by number of days. This keeps crawlers from visiting your site too often.
<meta name="revisit-after" content="30 days">
- Keywords should be specific to the page where the header is placed. Key words, and phrases, can be specified and should be separated by commas. If no key words are available, insert the key words defined for the prior page or "index" page located in that folder.
Keywords should not necessarily cover links on the page, but should mainly include topics, concepts, and associations discussed within the page. Multiple word groups are better than single words. The length should be no more than 250 characters. (NOTE: Most sites have begun to omit this META tag. Search engines have begun to ignore this tag due to a history of indexing abuse with the tag.) <meta name="keywords" content="...">
- A description should be descriptive of the content of the page. If no description is available, it should at least include the first couple of sentences from the page, or a descriptive passage from the body of the page. The length should be no more than 250 characters.
<meta name="description" content="...">
- Date last edited provides the freshness-of-content date in a universal format. (Can be completed by the server with date/time stamping using a scripting language like SSI.)
<meta name="date" content="yyyy-mm-dd">
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Ownership information:
- * Give a notice of ownership for the content of the page, and be sure to list enough detail for ownership (i.e. company, department, office).
<meta name="copyright" content="Office, Department, Company">
- Define specific permissions granted with this document: Copyrighted Work, Private, Public, or Public Domain. If your site is available for free distribution, that statement can be included here.
<meta name="doc-rights" content="Copyrighted Work">
or with specifics on portions
<meta name="doc-rights" content="images: Copyrighted Work; content: Public Domain">- Indicate the person or office responsible for maintaining this web page.
<meta name="author" content="...">
- Author of the site will help to solve code problems.
<meta name="publisher" content="...">
- Provide the site publisher's (editor) e-mail address, encoded in a way to help prevent Search/Index Bot or Internet Spam messages.
<meta http-equiv="reply-to" content="anonymous(AT)example(D0T)com">
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Nature of the content:
- * A notice of the intended audience. There are other rating methods being used throughout the internet, most presented by rating services, which can restrict children from certain content. Audience types are: Safe for Kids, 14 Years, General, Mature, or Restricted.
<meta name="rating" content="General">
- Content is considered Global or Local in its message.
<meta name="distribution" content="Global">
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Status and delivery of the document:
- Explain what material is within the document: Papers, eZine, Government, Journal, Manuscript, Paper, Private, Public, Web Page, or White Paper.
<meta name="doc-type" content="Web Page">
- List the current status of this document: Completed, Draft, Living Document, or Published.
<meta name="doc-class" content="Living Document">
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Client interpretation parameters:
- Prevent Microsoft's associative SmartTag links? TRUE (deny) / FALSE (permit)
<meta name="MSSmartTagsPreventParsing" content="TRUE">
The main idea is to use these METAs, as suggested here, throughout your web site. This will produce the most consistent and best results from any search engine query, according to our research. (However, the key point to these suggestions is to get your pages best represented in the search engines.)
A portion of this list comes from AnyBrowser.com. Additional META information can be found at META name rating, eDEVcafe, MetaTab, indexDOT, or the Dictionary of META TAGS.
