What are the right meta tags that a website should contain? Those are the “shorthand” bits of information that web crawlers like Google like to read, so that they know what type of web page they are going to crawl?
Well, here are the set that I have settled on:
<title>Cowan Creek Consulting</title>
<meta name="google-site-verification" content="q2kwN0dGn9C8IXnar7
h8jm-IjtqFQ7Mzgx8qW2eRUNw" />
<meta content="Cowan, Creek, Consulting, web, design, development,
designers, deveopers, PHP, applications, Sydney, Homebush, NSW,
St Ives" name="keywords" />
<meta content="Web based business specialists. Business Strategy -
Branding & Design - Web Solutions - Email Marketing" name="description" />
<meta content="text/html; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="Content-Type" />
<meta content="no-cache" http-equiv="Cache-Control" />
<meta content="Cowan Creek Consulting" name="owner" />
<meta content="Cowan Creek Consulting Pty Ltd Tel: +61 2 8746 0067"
name="author" />
<meta content="0" http-equiv="expires" />
<meta content="English" http-equiv="Content-Language" />
<meta content="Document" http-equiv="vw96.object type" />
<meta content="General" name="rating" />
<meta content="index,follow" name="ROBOTS" />
<meta content="7 days" name="REVISIT-AFTER" />
Let’s explain them:
<title> That’s the name of the page. It needs to be a thoughtful logical and relevant title. For my business website, it’s the name of my company: Cowan Creek Consulting.
<meta name=”google-site-verification” – This is a tag that says this website is registered within the Google Webmasters program. If you haven’t found Google webmasters yet, go and read about it. It will help you get you web page organised for site crawlers.
<meta name=”keywords” content=”(list of keywords)”/> this used to be a vital tag. It provided relevant keywords in to Google to help with its searches. These days it is not so relevant because Google can rapidly and easily crawl an entire page of content.
<meta name=”description” content=”(sentence about your website)”/> when you search for Cowan Creek Consulting in Google, this is the sentence that is returned below the page title link. So the combination of title tag and description tag forms your little advert on Google.
<meta content=”text/html; charset=utf-8″ http-equiv=”Content-Type” /> This is the character set that has been used to code the page. I almost always specify UTF-8 as it is a broad superset of standard web charatcers and all modern browsers can read UTF-8.
<meta content=”no-cache” http-equiv=”Cache-Control” /> This tells a web page not to retain any variables or content after leaving the page.
<meta content=”Cowan Creek Consulting” name=”owner” /> This is pretty obvious, it shows who owns the page.
<meta content=”Cowan Creek Consulting Pty Ltd Tel: +61 2 8746 0067″ name=”author” /> Again, pretty obvious, it shows who is the author of the page. Although this doesn’t get used in Google searches, it is a neat way for us to be able to “sign our work”.
<meta content=”0″ http-equiv=”expires” /> This shows when the page expires.
<meta content=”English” http-equiv=”Content-Language” /> This is the language of the page. I generally produce pages in English, although I have been asked to produce pages in Portugese and Chinese. I will then code in English but the content on the page will be in a specific language.
<meta content=”General” name=”rating” /> Again, another obvious tag. It tells the crawler the rating of the page. As mine is a business website with general content, it is classified “General”.
<meta content=”index,follow” name=”ROBOTS” /> Here we tell web crawlers if they are allowed to index the page and follow the links on the page. We want Google all over our website, so we set them, to idex, follow, but if the page was a private members only page or other page of resticted content, we would set the pointers to no-index and no-follow.
<meta content=”7 days” name=”REVISIT-AFTER” />And when do we recommend a web crawler should come back and take another look at our web page. Be careful you don’t set the revisit number too low, bringing a crawler back to look at content that has not been changed. Remember, crawlers like fresh, new, original and interesting content.
