keywords, content, actionscript..

a few questions pls..

[Special Edition]

Greetings,
I'm new around here and I've read a lot of forums and posts, I came here by way of me trying to understand SEO, as much as I've read a lot of threads, I'm yet to see which one answers my question precisely, Yeah some of my questions have been covered but I just want to ask a few, I hope y'all don't get annoyed cause if i know if I spend more time looking, I will probably find my answers.

I've just finished designing my first site and I'm about to submit to search engines, but I'm yet to write out the meta tags properly.
How many tags do I need...

Decription, Keywords and robots right?
While looking at source code, I've seen
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="INDEX,FOLLOW"> and
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="ALL">

Which one is better?

Also do I need the meta revisits tag? The links that I followed here, SEO expert, does not have it, but I've seen some other sites with it.

Also in the keywords, the SEO expert, did not have commas in his keywords, don't I need them? when I need to separate keywords?

And lastly, Can I learn actionscripting w/out knowing flash? or can I start actionsripting and flash at the same time?

I hope I haven't asked too many questions, thank u in advance.

[Susanne]

Hi!
You don't need any of those META tags. And the revisit tag isn't necessary either. Saves space!
If you have pages that you don't want indexed BUT you want spiders to follow the links on those pages, you can use this META:
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="noindex,follow"> And vice versa. Or "noindex,nofollow> if you don't want them to follow the links either.
But some spiders might not obey this tag.

Commas or no commas in your keywords tag is irrelevant. You save a little space by excluding the commas. Not many engines use this tag anyway. Maybe one or two nowadays.

Sorry. I cannot answer your last question but surely somebody around here will be able to. Happy new year!

[mat_bastian]

"Can I learn actionscripting without learning Flash?"

Actionscript is a proprietary language of Macromedia, In a sense it is Flash, so I would say, no, you cannot learn actionscript without learning flash, however don't let that stop you from learning other forms of Object Oriented Programing.

If you are interested in actionscripting, you may want to look into picking up some javascript as they can be terribly similar.

Good luck.

[Special Edition]

Thanks Susanne and Mat.

[lorax]

Can I learn actionscripting w/out knowing flash?

Well, yes and no.

Yes, you can learn action scripting but you will still need to learn at least some of the commands to operate the stage and objects within Flash.

But, you can avoid having to learn all of the tools for creating graphics if you have someone you can rely on to create these for you. This is how larger Flash projects are often built. A designer designs and the programmer programs.

If you're like most of us though, you'll find it's very handy to learn both!

[Special Edition]

Thanx Lorax, I'll learn both, maybe I shoulda re-phrase my questions like, is it possible to learn both at the same time?
Susanne or anyone, if u're saying "U don't need anyone of those tags" which ones do I need then please?
Happy new year, it's already 2003 here in England..y'all still got a couple of hours to go.

[rjohara]

There have been several posts from people recently asking about meta elements - which ones to use, how to use them, etc. Opinions differ, and no doubt the services that use them will change over time too, but here's what I have found useful. Beginners won't go far wrong by following these recommendations.

<meta name="robots" content="index,follow"> (or noindex,nofollow, or follow,noindex, etc.) Well-behaved spiders like Googlebot obey this element and you can use to to keep individual pages out of the index. I don't think the fine details of the syntax (which one to list first, e.g.) make any difference.

<meta name="description" content="My page of data on fuzzy widget reproduction, fully illustrated."> Google has been using the meta description element off and on for some searches, and other search engines certainly use it. It is wise to keep it below roughly 150 characters; that seems to be the limit that Google displays sometimes in place of the snippet. Word the description carefully so that it is a subtitle for your page title, because that is how it will appear on SERPs that use it; in other words, don't repeat the title, but expand on it (what would you say in the title if you could make it 150 characters longer?).

<meta name="keywords" content="widgets blue fuzzy reproduction fission mitosis"> In general, most search engines don't use the keywords meta element any more, but it is possible that some may (and who knows how things might change some day). I put one in, but keep it short - fewer than 10 words. It probably is a waste of space, but I don't think it hurts as long as it is short.

One other meta element that people sometimes forget is the one that specifies charset: <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"> People who are technical server specialists (which I certainly am not) get into deep discussions about how to specify the charset of a document. This method works, it is easy, and the W3C validator likes it. Obviously if you're using something other than the usual English/European character set you'd change it accordingly, but this is the version that will work for most English-language pages.

If you want to get fancy you can start putting in author elements using the Dublin core specifications, and other similar things, but most browsers and spiders won't notice them.

So the bottom line summary for beginners is: use "robots", "description" and maybe "keywords" meta elements, keeping the last two short, and use a meta element to specify charset (put that right at the top, usually the first item after the opening <head> tag).

[Special Edition]

Thank u very much rjohara, very informative. I'll go with those.