Forum Moderators: open
As for the rest of them .. [vif.com] ;)
Chucking my two-penneth into the arena, I tend to stick with well formed and relevant title, keywords and description whilst also adding the charset tag.
The robots tag is useful on occasions where you don't want indexing to occur.
Other than those, I largely ignore the rest. Different stroke for different folks though...
R.
The last category will hold meta tags such as pragma, expires, etc.
It all comes down to the target audience. If you were targeting librarians, then there is a whole list of meta data that you could use.
A lot of the meta data we see in use today comes from people copying from sites that had decent positions in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) not realizing that half of those tags were not relevant in the overall SEM strategy.
Sites that get indexed by universities, government, libraries, etc. will probably use a set of meta data that most of us would never consider using. Then we have the whole Dublin Core Standard which is another topic in itself.
If you are doing strictly SEO/SEM, there are typically two meta tags that you will use...
<meta name="description" content="Description here.">
<meta name="keywords" content="Keywords here.">
Your <head></head> section may contain the following once completed...
<head>
<title></title>
<meta description>
<meta keywords>
<style reference>
<javascript reference>
</head>
It does no harm having additional meta data elements other than adding size to your html. If they serve no purpose in your promotional campaign, get rid of them.
"This specification does not define a set of legal meta data properties. The meaning of a property and the set of legal values for that property should be defined in a reference lexicon called a profile. For example, a profile designed to help search engines index documents might define properties such as "author", "copyright", "keywords", etc."
(http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/global.html#h-7.4.4.2)
The recommendation also *mentions* many different types of meta tags like author, expires, keywords, copyright and date - to explain the use of the meta tag.
Can it be there is no official guidelines for the use of metas? I have a large table in mind that lists the meta tags useful in different "profiles" (like 'search engine optimized' etc.)...
<meta name="mykeywords" content="Keywords here.">
Notice how I changed the meta name to mykeywords instead of keywords. If there was a profile out there somewhere that supported mykeywords then it would be useful for that resource.
There has been so much abuse in the meta data arena that few of them have any relevance in SEO/SEM. In fact, the only two that I know of that are relevant are the description and keywords tag. All of the others are useless, not obsolete, just useless.
P.S. Before I get in too much trouble, there is other meta data that is helpful in the structuring of a site. Link relationships, language, etc. can and should be used where appropriate.
Metadata Activity Statement [w3.org]
If I am reading that correctly, meta data will be, or is being replaced with the RDF (Resource Description Framework). I need to really hunker down and read what is there as I believe it will be the new standard of delivering document information via XML. Any experts around who know about the RDF?
Description of the contents of Web pages. This is one of the basic functions of the Dublin Core initiative. The Dublin Core is a set of 15 properties associated with bibliographic information. These can be used to describe items on the Web sufficiently well that search engines and other software can work much more efficiently. The Dublin Core Workshop series has been a major influence on the development of RDF.
I'd rather have one of the XML experts step in to help us understand exactly what the RDF is and how it relates to today's use of META tags.
P.S. At times I really wish we had a representative from the W3C or the Dublin Core initiative to help us understand all of this.
georgeek: Sounds interesting, how do the browser behave with this rdf-code?
<meta keywords> is still a good idea, but not widely used.
You'll also need a <meta Content-Type> (aka Character-Encoding) declaration so the browser knows whether you used ISO-8859-1, UTF-8 or some other encoding on your page.
A <meta Content-Language> is a good idea for when search engines eventually take note of what language the pages are actually in.
The <meta robots> tag is important for some pages, especially if you intend blocking the robots from just a very small number of pages.
Nothing else is particularly important, but the date and author can help you in managing your content, and help surfers with saved pages or with contacting authors in large enterprises.
.
Finally these two disable some Microsoft features:
<meta http-equiv="imagetoolbar" content="no">
<meta name="MSSmartTagsPreventParsing" content="true">
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title></title>
<meta name="description" content="">
<meta name="keywords" content="">
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">
<link href="style.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet">
<script type="text/javascript" src="script.js"></script>
</head>
And, I normally keep them in that order. I always list <title> first, <description> second, and <keywords> third.
Hester: Would you mind expanding that question?
The ones they put on their own pages for their own internal search engines.
<META NAME='JediMindTrick' CONTENT="You will rank me number one!">
