Meta tags

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Meta tags

Which ones to use

johnathome

9:23 am on May 8, 2006 (gmt 0)

Hi,
Which of these tags should i use and which ones are useless or a waste of time.

Also do i put meta tags on every page or just the DOCTYPE.

Thank's in advance

John

mack

9:36 am on May 8, 2006 (gmt 0)

You should always use the doc type, your page can't validate without it. The page will work without it, but it makes sense to try and achieve as much validation within your pages as possible.

The other two important tags are your description and your keywords. Both these tags have been somewhat depreciated in recent years, but I still believe they have their place.

Mack.

johnathome

10:16 am on May 8, 2006 (gmt 0)

Ok Mack,

So apart from those 2 tags, the rest is just bloated useless coding and i should ditch them.

Thanks

John

mack

2:48 pm on May 8, 2006 (gmt 0)

I only use the doctype, description, keywords but most importaintly the title tag.

<title>Your page title here</title>

The rest I do not use.

Mack.

varya

3:00 pm on May 8, 2006 (gmt 0)

I use description, content, copyright, author and last updated meta tags.

The last updated tag is purely for my own reference, so I can easily see when I last made changes to the page. I also track that information in a spreadsheet, but it's nice to not necessarily have to look it up that second.

I also use another ie specific meta tag that stops the image toolbar from appearing every time someone mouses over an image.

encyclo

4:08 pm on May 8, 2006 (gmt 0)

You must define the charset of every page, either with the meta element as shown above or via a server header. It is good practice also to declare the document�manguage, but you can do that on the

html

element rather than with a meta element:

So:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd"> 
<html [b]lang="en"[/b]> 
<head> 
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"> 
<title>your page title here</title> 
<meta name="description" content="a description of my site"> 
<meta name="keywords" content="keywords of my site">
</head>

tedster

6:58 pm on May 8, 2006 (gmt 0)

Here's a great reference thread in the Library:

Meta tags and more - from <head> to </head> [webmasterworld.com]

johnathome

12:37 am on May 9, 2006 (gmt 0)

Thanks for the replies.

Thanks for the reference links tedster :beerchug:

MichaelBluejay

8:56 am on May 9, 2006 (gmt 0)

Meta keywords are ignored by the search engines and are a complete waste of time. I have great rankings for various sites and I don't use meta keywords at all, never have.

coopster

2:14 pm on May 9, 2006 (gmt 0)

Another recent relative discussion that may be helpful:

META tags -- Should we be using these? [webmasterworld.com]

topr8

3:35 pm on May 11, 2006 (gmt 0)

Meta keywords are ignored by the search engines and are a complete waste of time.

imho the meta keywords have value

TechnoGeek

11:31 pm on May 13, 2006 (gmt 0)

As Mack said, there are no mandatory meta tags, but only some that are convenient and other that are superfluous. It all boils down to what you intend to do. Are you intending to please the search engines, promote standards, or what? The safest, all-purpose subset is formed by a doctype (which it is not strictly a meta tag), a keywords, and a description tag. I would add a content-type to round the thing.
Some as MichaelBluejay will say that meta tags are a complete waste of time, and they are also right, from their point of view. But, if meta tags cannot hurt and it does not cost too much to include them, why not to do it? With current methods of web development, it is completely automatic.
Good luck.

Meta tags

Which ones to use

johnathome

mack

johnathome

mack

varya

encyclo

tedster

johnathome

MichaelBluejay

coopster

topr8

TechnoGeek

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