Forum Moderators: open
<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="drinks">
<META NAME="description" CONTENT="">
<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="All">
<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="FOLLOW,INDEX">
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOARCHIVE">
<META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOARCHIVE">
<META NAME="revisit-after" CONTENT="7 days">
<META NAME="distribution" CONTENT="Global">
<META NAME="audience" CONTENT="All">
<META NAME="abstract" CONTENT="">
<META NAME="summary" CONTENT="">
<META NAME="classification" CONTENT="general">
I dont understand the folowing
content - nothing was typed
robots - why robot, why all
why follow,index
what is googlebot and why no archive
why revisit after 7 days? instrcution to the googlebot?
I dont undersatnd - audience, abstract, and classification
why summary is empty.
i expected to see author name but its not there. thanks.
WW Search for "meta tag":
[google.com...]
I have a couple of such pages. I use templates that have this meta tag and sometimes I get a little too busy and upload a page before I have written something here.
Some webmasters may use a WYSIWYG editor and have this meta tag as default in their pages without actually knowing it.
> why revisit after 7 days? instrcution to the googlebot?
Yup. And to bots from other search engines. AFAIK this tag is completely useless. The bots come when they come.
> i expected to see author name but its not there.
Same problem as in the content meta tag.
Your document should begin with a !DOCTYPE (tells the browser what sort of HTML is in the file) and a title element:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
<title> Your Title Here </title>
For your page to actually be valid you MUST declare the character encoding (lets the browser know whether to use A to Z letters (latin), or Chinese, Japanese, Thai, or Arabic script, or some other character set) used for the page, with something like:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
There are also other schemes such as UTF-8 and many others.
It is also a good idea to declare what language the page is in, using:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="EN-GB">
The language and country codes come from ISO 4217 and ISO 3166. This is useful for online translation tools as well. Change the "en" and "gb" to whatever language and country you need.
You need the meta description tag, and it is useful but not vital to have a meta keywords tag:
<meta name="Description" content=" Your Description Here. ">
<meta name="Keywords" content=" your, keyword, list, here ">
The last parts of your header should have your links to external style sheets and external javascript files:
Use this if the stylesheet is for all browsers:
<link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" src="/path/file.css">
Use this for style sheet that you want to hide from older browsers, as older browsers often crash on seeing CSS:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Style-Type" content="text/css">
<style type="text/css"> @import url(/path/file.css); </style>
Use this for the javascript:
<script type="text/javascript" language="javascript" src="/path/file.js"></script>
End the header with this:
</head>
<body>
and then continue with the body page code.
It is as simple as that.
Code within the page:
I use: <a href="somepage.html" title="some text here"></a> for links.
I use <img src="somefile.png" alt="some text"> for images.
Headings are done with <hx></hx> tags, properly used from <h1></h1> downwards.
There seems to be differing opinions about the best way do identify the language of a document. I have been using meta tags for this purpose for some time, but am now in the proces of removing them.
In stead I put this information in
<html>
Like this:
<html lang="en">
I am not sure why this is better, but I have seen it recommended on several websites run by rather competent persons. I have not seen them argue against the other possibility. They simply present this one. Any opinions?
There seems to be differing opinions about the best way do identify the language of a document.
<html lang="en"> is fine, and can replace the meta tag. However - there is a better way, especially if your site is unilingual - set the default language in the server configuration. If you're using Apache, add this to httpd.conf or to your root level .htaccess:
DefaultLanguage en(Replacing en with your appropriate country code if your site is not in English).
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
You can get rid of this one in the same way - add this to httpd.conf or .htaccess:
AddDefaultCharset ISO-8859-1On a multi-language / multi-charset site, you can also use <File> or <Directory> to specify, for example:
<Directory /english/*>DefaultLanguage enAddDefaultCharset ISO-8859-1</Directory><Directory /french/*>DefaultLanguage frAddDefaultCharset UTF-8</Directory>
DefaultLanguage en
Works beautifully, and as a bonus shows up in the header so I can check that it is for real :)
AddDefaultCharset ISO-8859-1
Currently I am using:
AddType 'text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1' html
I suspect that the AddDefaultCharset is more general? Thus, for example, I am currently not saying what charset I use in my .js files?
<added>Checked the headers of a .js file, and sure enough, no charset! Again, many thanks!</added>
Keywords are ignored by all major search engines and are therefore simply a waste of bandwidth.
Hmmm, not too sure that is a true statement. There are indications that some SEs are still utilizing the keywords tag in certain instances, including Google.
Use this for the javascript:<script type="text/javascript" language="javascript" src="/path/file.js"></script>
That can be shortened to...
<script type="text/javascript" src="/path/file.js"></script>
The language attribute is now deprecated.
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
It has been proven that using a shortened DOCTYPE is just like not having one. Without the DTD reference, the browser goes into Quirks mode and therefore negates the use of the DOCTYPE. The full DOCTYPE to use will depend on which one you choose. For HTML loose, it is...
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
I just added
AddDefaultCharset ISO-8859-1
DefaultLanguage en[/pre]
to my .htacess, which already had
[pre]AddType 'text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1' html
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
Content-Language: en
Content-Type: application/x-javascript
Content-Language: en
Is my syntax correct (the segment from the .htaccess file has been cut and pasted)?
but when I fetch the headers of calc.js I only get: <snip> with no charset :(
I assume that the
AddDefaultCharsettext/htmlThe advantage of
AddDefaultCharsetAddTypetext/htmlI forget to mention you can also send the Content-Language and Content-Type as headers via a scripting language, eg in PHP:
<?phpheader('Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1');header('Content-Language: en-ca');?>Again, avoiding the need for the meta tags. I found out in another thread that you can also send PICS label information in the same way.
