Forum Moderators: open
There is plenty of information on this board about the useful/lessness of metatags.
Richard
Also, from my point of view, unless you are developing something like an Intranet where your own internal site search uses some of these lesser known tags, you don't need to know most of the meta tags that have been created over the years. It's certain that the major search engines don't give a hoot about them.
One "off-brand" meta tag that I find practical for some sites (though not for SEO) is this:
<meta http-equiv="imagetoolbar" content="no">
It turns off that danged IE image toolbar.
you mean like the 'back' and 'home' buttons and what not?
i just used it and it had no effect for me.
May I suggest a Google search on "meta tag site:webmasterworld.com". Lots to read about on the 3,980 pages returned from these very forums.
And may I suggest that you start with this excellent thread
[webmasterworld.com...]
Your document should begin with a !DOCTYPE (tells the browser what sort of HTML is in the file) and starting tags:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
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 content 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.
The <title> tag is very importent. It shows in the SERPs, as well as along the top of the browser window:
<title> Your Title Here </title>
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 ">
You might also want to include author and revision date information, usually for content control (versioning) purposes, but those have no relevance to search engines.
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.
Don't bother with tags like revisit and so on, these are a waste of bandwidth.
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.
