richlowe - 1:07 am on May 28, 2002 (gmt 0)

I've done a lot of research on meta tags and their use, and here's an example of what I have concluded is of most value to me.

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">

Nice to know what character set is supposed to be used for the page.

<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en-us">

Language is useful to readers and search engines what to expect. Some pages have been translated into spanish and, of all things, russian, and are marked accordingly.

<meta http-equiv="pics-label" content='(pics-1.1 "http://www.icra.org/ratingsv02.html" l gen true for "http://www.internet-tips.net" r (cz 1 lc 1 nz 1 oz 1 vz 1) "http://www.rsac.org/ratingsv01.html" l gen true for "http://www.internet-tips.net" r (n 0 s 0 v 0 l 1))'>
<meta http-equiv="PICS-Label" content='(PICS-1.1 "http://www.classify.org/safesurf/" l r (SS~~000 1))'>

I like to let my readers know they can expect my site to be safe for all ages.

<meta name="author" content="Richard G. Lowe, Jr.">

That's me.

<meta name="copyright" content="Copyright © 1999-2002 Richard Lowe and Claudia Arevalo-Lowe, All Rights Reserved">

And my wife and I own the copyright.

<meta name="description" content="TCP/IP - the foundation of the internet. This is the information about the protocol which makes the internet work.">

Description is useful for manys search engines. This is also what is displayed by my own internal PERL search engine.

<meta name="keywords" content="tcp/ip,tcpip,ip,network protocol">

Keywords help my own internal search engine as well as other engines. Also, I have found some of the smaller directories and engines use these to catagorize the site.

<meta name="rating" content="GENERAL">

Another way to say my site is family safe.

<meta name="ROBOTS" content="ALL">

The page can be indexed.

<meta name="MSSmartTagsPreventParsing" content="TRUE">

Keep away Microsoft Smart tags.

<title>TCP/IP - the foundation of the internet</title>

Of course, the title is used by both my internal search engine and the others as well.

I specifically set pragma and expires in the header (in IIS this is easy, don't know about apache) because HMTL is not parsed by proxy servers and such, but the headers are. My pages don't change often so I want them to remain cached for a long time, so I set the expire to 6 months in the header.

I thought about "reply-to" then realized I would just be helping email harvesters, so I don't use it.

My philosophy on the use of these tags is simple. Yes, they are of value to some search engines, but more importantly, the tags tell the outside world things about my pages. So the questions I ask myself is "what do I want to make known that is not obvious from the page itself", "is a meta tag the best way to do it (sometimes setting the HTTP header is better, for example) and "is the tag abused (such as reply-to))

I am also starting to use more and more of the <LINK> tag, as I think it is very useful to tell the world how my web site is structured. I like the way you can relate a page to it's chapter, section, table of contents and so on. This seems like, when the feature becomes more widely supported, it will make life easier for everyone.

Richard Lowe