META statements to help search engines

What are Meta Statements

META statements help the search engines to reference your website. Some people can get away with not having them on some search engines, but why chance it?

You can invent your own META statements for your own purposes. Only a few are sometimes taken to account by others.

The two required statements:
<META NAME="description" CONTENT="Some words here">
<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="this, that, theother, ">

There are some other useful METAs discussed below:
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">
<META HTTP-EQUIV="refresh" CONTENT="0; URL=http://www.whatever.com">
<meta name="MSSmartTagsPreventParsing" content="TRUE">
(which prevents the MS Smart tags working with the newest IE browsers.

Others could be of the form
<meta name="rating" content="general">
(the options are mature, restricted, 14 years)
<meta name="security" content="public">
<meta name="distribution" content="global">
<meta name="generator" content="name of your authoring tool inserted automatically in most cases">
<meta name="author" content="your name address URL and whatever">

How you interpret them is up to you and your colleagues, perhaps in an Intranet situation. If anyone looks at your HTML code then perhaps the author META will be interesting to them.

Description and Keywords
At the top of the first (Index) page there should be two Meta statements for use by Search Engines, Description and Keywords.

<META NAME="description" CONTENT="website creation, training, consultancy, Goring-by-Sea, Worthing, Sussex, UK, Richard Waller">

<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="website creation, create, creator, develop, develope, developer, design, training, consultant, business, goring-by-sea, worthing, sussex, uk, richard waller, Goring-by-Sea, Worthing, Sussex, UK, Richard Waller">

META Description:

• The text in the Meta description statement can be the same as the text in the Title statement.
• The text should read as a logical sentence using upper and lower case
• The three or so key words or phrases should be shown first in order of likely use as a search key by surfers
• Max 20 words and 200 characters

META Keywords

In any case it may be that only the first 20 keywords have importance, and we should try and cover the ground in these. Also there seems to be a limit of 200-500 characters before the robots give up.

• Between 12 and 20 words will be good, mainly nouns,
• Phrases will be even better - for ideas check http://inventory.goto.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ or http://www.wordtracker.com/
• The keywords and key phrases from the Description should be repeated here,
• Phrases between commas are most important; a pair of words like ,stamp collecting, would be excellent,
• Other key words can follow, which should be words that occur in that page text; all those words that may be used by searchers looking for your material,
• Submit other pages with the proper keywords for those pages there,
• should be all lower case,
• Proper names can be repeated in capitised form, like: Richard Waller,
• words separated by commas or with a space at your option. Phrases separated by commas are a good idea,
• do not repeat words unnecessarily, certainly not more than three times; (this is called spamming and is a No-no),
• use the singular and if possible and appropriate also the plural, and specify US spelling and misspellings,
• Anything more than 1000 or so characters will probably be be truncated.

The web-page heading

Text for the first 30 or so words in the page should include the main keywords. Some search engines may index words in the next 150-250 words. Some search engines, like Excite will show all the words that it can read, so choose them with care, and do not confuse them with images and links at the top of the page. These text words in the BODY are probably more important than anything else.

It is sometimes useful, according to the HTML standard to include a DOCTYPE clause as the first line on an HTML page. This is used if you run one of the validation programs to test the accuracy of your coding. The meanings of the various words are not useful to know here.

In summary, the top of your first page will be structured as follows, with the text repeated in each statement. Note that the TITLE statement should be the first item after the HEAD tag.

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 3.0//EN" "html.dtd">
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE> text </TITLE>
<META NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT=" text " >
<META NAME="KEYWORDS" CONTENT=" words, words, "></HEAD>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<H1>text</H1>
text words containing the keywords
<img src="yourimage.gif" width=31 height=31 border=0 alt="Text words with keywords">

You can also to do it all again, with specific information, on any key pages you would like specifically indexed in your site. This is very desirable if your site covers a number of topics and the keyword section on the homepage is too long and complex.

Refresh
Automatic transfer to the site or page you specify. The 0 indicates that the browser is to do it immediately, without warning. If you specify say 5, then the browser will delay for the surfer to read any text that you have on that page.
<META HTTP-EQUIV="refresh" CONTENT="0; URL=http://www.whatever.com">

Robots
If you do not want a page indexed for whatever reason, use a No Robots META statement as follows but note that not all Search Engine Spiders take note of it:
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">

By the way, a better way of preventing a page being indexed is to use a robots.txt file in the root directory. This is described on http://info.webcrawler.com/mak/projects/robots/faq.html#robotstxt
The basic form is a plain ordinary text file called robots.txt with two sorts of statements:
User-agent: * (where the star means all search engines)
Disallow: /
Disallow: /
Disallow: / (seperate lines with the names of the files or directories;
example
Disallow: /fun to cover the whole of this sub-directory,
or
Disallow: /fun/manager.htm for a particular file.)

To try and prevent your pages being cached by ISPs and thus not presenting the up-to-date version (use all three for this):
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Pragma" CONTENT="no-cache">
<META HTTP-EQUIV="expires" content="0">
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Cache-Control" content="no-cache, must-revalidate">