<meta name="robots" content="all" />?

[neophyte]

I'm a newbie developer who's got a client who doesn't want to spend the money to hire an SEO firm to optimize his site. I don't know much about SEO - although I've read some about it on the web - and am no being paid enough by this guy to do this level of work.

However, he does want a number of keywords in his "keyword" meta tag, and he wants his entire site spidered. In order for the robots to index his entire site, do I put <meta name="robots" content="all" />.

Isn't there also something like "robots, follow" or something like that where the spiders would follow all <href> links in a site?

Lastly, would someone let me know where I can find information on manually submitting this client's site to Google, MSN, etc., rather than just waiting around for the spiders to find the site.

All help greatly appreciated.

Neophyte

[Conard]

The standard bot behavior is to follow and index pages.
There is a protocol named the "Robots Exclusion Standard" where you can exclude pages from crawling and indexing using a tag or a robots.txt file but nothing you put in any tag will cause a page to be crawled and indexed.

The tag you mentioned is a waste of code.

[jdMorgan]

Neophyte,

As Conard says, the robots will default to the "index,follow" behaviour in the absence of directions to the contrary, and the meta-keywords tag is almost completely ignored these days due to past abuse.

There are much better ways to spend your time, and here's a good place to start:

Successful Site in 12 Months with Google Alone [webmasterworld.com]

Don't let the title fool you, as many of the points in that thread apply to the other engines as well.

Jim

[neophyte]

Jim and Conard -

Thanks much for your replys. Jim - I'll investigate the link posted. Thanks again to you both.